Soul of the new exurbs

Here's that NYTimes Magazine piece from last year about how megachurches are providing a sense of community -- the only sense of community -- for all the transplants moving to the new exurbs. Key quotes:

This is not the megachurch of the 1980's, where baby boomers turned up once a week to passively take in a 45-minute service -- ''religion as accessory,'' as Tom Beaudoin, an assistant professor of religion at Santa Clara University, has described the phenomenon. In a sense, the new breed of megachurches has more in common with the frontier churches of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which served as gathering places for pioneers who had gone West in search of opportunity. In sprawling, decentralized exurbs like Surprise, where housing developments rarely include porches, parks, stoops or any of the other features that have historically brought neighbors together, megachurches provide a locus for community. In many places, they operate almost like surrogate governments, offering residents day care, athletic facilities, counseling, even schools. Taking the comparison one step further, there's even a tax, albeit a voluntary one: members are encouraged to tithe, or donate 10 percent of their income to the church. At Radiant, McFarland says, about one-quarter of the members do.

It's hard to imagine a more effective method of religious outreach, which is, after all, the goal of evangelical churches like Radiant. As McFarland told me: ''I'm just trying to get people in the door.'' To that end, Radiant has designed its new 55,000-square-foot church to look more like an overgrown ski lodge than a place of worship. ''For people who haven't been to church, or went once and got burned, the anxiety level is really high,'' McFarland says. '' 'Is it going to be freaky? Is it going to be like what I see on Christian TV?' So we've tried to bring down those visual cues that scare people off.''

In fact, everything about Radiant has been designed to lure people away from other potential weekend destinations. The foyer includes five 50-inch plasma-screen televisions, a bookstore and a cafe with a Starbucks-trained staff making espresso drinks. (For those who are in a rush, there's a drive-through latte stand outside the main building.) Krispy Kreme doughnuts are served at every service. (Radiant's annual Krispy Kreme budget is $16,000). For kids there are Xboxes (10 for fifth and sixth graders alone). ''That's what they're into,'' McFarland says. ''You can either fight it or say they're a tool for God.'' The dress code is lax: most worshipers wear jeans, sweats or shorts, depending on the season. (''At my old church, we thought we were casual because we wore mock turtlenecks under our blazers,'' Radiant's youth pastor told me.) Even the baptism pool is seductive: Radiant keeps the water at 101 degrees. ''We've had people say, 'No, leave me under,' '' McFarland says. ''It's like taking a dip in a spa.''

Now, let me be clear: this sort of place makes me crazy. I believe it turns religion into a consumer product, a sideshow, you name it. A baptismal pool like a spa? Vomit. I wouldn't want to go to this place.

But I cannot dismiss it, because churches like this are responding to something people are hungry for: real community. You can't have real community without a shared moral vision, which is what these folks, whatever their flaws, do seem to have. I am wondering if this is what Alasdair Macintyre had in mind when he said that our fragmenting American society, where the moral center is no longer holding, would produce people who would pioneer new forms of community? It must be.

Is this a bad thing? If so, how could it be made a better thing?

The timid Democrats

The Democrats aren't sure what to do next. Some say the party should hang back and let the Republicans hang themselves -- in other words, run simply on "Had enough?" Others say the party should press forward with a bold agenda, to give the voters something to vote for instead of relying on them voting against the GOP.

Me, I'd like to see them take some bold steps instead of this tactical nickel-and-diming. But I gotta say, when the public faces of your party are Nancy Pelosi, Howard Dean and Hillary Rodham Clinton, you've got a long way to go to sell any agenda.

Country vs. flag

Caleb Stegall appreciates this passage from John Lukacs:

[T]he main question of the twenty-first century, the main problem, perhaps especially for Americans: the necessity to rethink the entire meaning of “progress.” … Our “conservatives” care not for the conservation of the country, and of the American land. Yet: more than tax policy, more than education policy, more than national security policy, more even than the painful abortion issue, this is where the main division is beginning to occur. So it is in my township. It is the division between people who want to develop, to build up, to pour more concrete and cement on the land, and those who wish to protect the landscape (and the cityscape) where they live. (Landscape, not wilderness. The propagation of wilderness, the exaltation of “nature” against all human presence, is the fatal shortcoming of many American environmentalists.) Beneath that division I sometimes detect the division between a true love of one’s country and the rhetorical love of symbols such as the flag, in the name of a mythical people; between the ideals of American domesticity and those of a near-nomadic life; between privacy and publicity; between the ideals of stability and those of endless “growth.”

The "near-nomadic life" is something we've all come to accept as an inevitable part of life in the modern economy. Again, going back to a theme in our California discussion, is this nomadism a liberation, or a prison? When I was in California visiting with P., we talked about how our fathers could barely conceive of leaving their hometowns behind ... and yet both of us couldn't wait to do so. It was liberation for us to be free to follow our own dreams of career, of personal fulfillment, and so forth. And yet, what have we (that is, we Americans) lost in the process? Is it possible to regain it? Are we prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to regain it? Or is that even possible? That is, has the economy been built on a nomadic culture, such that many Americans have no choice but to be a nomad if they want to stay gainfully employed?

Who is the real conservative: the person who figures out a way to dig in and stay, or the person who leaves in search of opportunity (financial or otherwise)? And whether they vote Democratic or Republican, does that ultimately matter?

I talked to a colleague this morning, also a non-Texan by birth, who said that most of his friends aren't Dallas natives, and that very few of them have an abiding interest in what goes on in this city beyond their own narrow circles. He was talking about this as a modern condition for more and more of us. We aren't encouraged to think about the wider community, or to set down roots, because either we look forward to the next job that will cause us to uproot ourselves, or we work in a sector of the economy that will probably force us to uproot ourselves and move on as the economy shifts.

This colleague, who is non-religious, pointed to how in the northern Dallas suburbs, all these rootless folks are gravitating to their churches for a sense of community. Which is normal, and natural. And, if you think about it, Benedictine. But it doesn't bode well for the future of communities and communitarianism, at least in the way we've understood them till now.

The new title

Clark Stooksbury notices that the excitable lads over at Contra-Crunchy are engaging in creative conspiracy-mongering over why the title for the paperback edition of "Crunchy Cons" is going to be a lot shorter. Clark sensibly suggests an alternative explanation: "How about this -- the original subtitle was simply way too long?"

That, I'm afraid, is the correct answer. The original subtitle was there in part as a marketing decision; few people would have known what a "crunchy conservative" was, but putting words like "organic," "Evangelical," "gun-loving," "homeschooling," etc. on the cover telegraphed important information to the casual browser. We can afford to make it a lot shorter on the paperback version (which will now be subtitled, "The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots," and will have a new chapter too).

A sense of place

In the latest California thread below, Paddy O hits on something important in defining the California (and probably the Western) sensibility, versus the Eastern and Southern one:

Even as you feel anxiety about having nothing permanent I, as a Californian, feel that to be an adventure.

Americans have a unity, but we in different regions are still very different. The Western man is not the Southern man even if we watch the same television shows and pray to the same God.

Well said. I mentioned to a colleague of mine yesterday (she's a Kansan) how I had the feeling in California that "anything could happen." She said, "Why is that a bad thing?" Which is, I guess, Paddy O's point. Californians, broadly speaking, like the fact that they can be anything they want to be in that lovely, free country. For somebody like me, that "lightness of being" is almost unbearable. A friend of mine, the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, explained to me about 15 years ago that the people who built his native Vancouver were Canadians who ran away from an Eastern establishment that they considered oppressive. He used his own parents as an example of this, and until then, I had never quite thought of it that way with regard to our own West Coast, and its culture.

A reader in Dallas wrote to say that I got Joan Didion all wrong, that she wasn't saying California is unlike the rest of us, but that it is more like us than we are ourselves. What he meant -- and this is a point I agree with -- is that Californians are the ultimate Americans, if you conceive of Americans as people who left behind the weight and constraints of the Old World to create a world in their own image. I didn't mean to give the impression that I thought otherwise in my discussion of Didion. I do believe, as the reader says, that California is the ultimate result of the American experiment, which is why trends that start there manage to roll so easily through the rest of the country: we are culturally prepared for it by virtue of the fact that we are Americans, and all the descendants of restless people.

Small world!

Today I received a wonderful e-mail from an old friend who'd read "Crunchy Cons" and sent word that he'd very much enjoyed it. The friend is Father Winthrop Brainerd, the very fine Catholic priest who instructed me in the faith and ushered me into the Catholic Church (at the hands of Cardinal Hickey) back in 1993. Last I'd heard, he was prospering greatly at a parish in Georgetown, where his traditionalism had boosted attendance greatly. That sort of thing apparently put him crossways Cardinal McCarrick, the Archbishop of Washington and the Jersey Shore Beach House, who forcibly retired him and sent Fr. Brainerd to a suburban Maryland parish. Happily, Father Brainerd seems to be serving his people well there, and it was a real pleasure to hear from him again, especially because he found the book's themes so congenial. And get this: it was Father Brainerd who celebrated and preached the memorial mass for Russell Kirk!

There's still something about California

I've been telling various conservative friends about how strange I found my reaction to northern California: that it was extraordinarily beautiful and welcoming and easygoing, but that I felt unnerved by it, as if there were something ... unhinged about the place, as if its prosperity, its beauty and thoroughgoing pleasantness were a thin veneer over something chaotic. Oddly enough, several of them report having had the same feeling, and not being able to explain it. A conservative journalist friend I spoke with this afternoon said that a former girlfriend was driving him around southern California a few years ago, and remarked, "Can't you feel your will just slipping away?" Yes, that's it! But why should it be so? And why California? I've lived up and down the East Coast, and traveled all over Europe, but I've never had the same feeling anywhere.

I remarked to my pals that somehow driving around there helped me understand Joan Didion's 1967 essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," a stunning journalistic account of moral collapse among privileged young Americans living in San Francisco, who had lost their center entirely. Didion has said that reporting and writing the essay left her depressed, because it forced her to confront directly the fact that "things fall apart." Here's a key passage from that piece:

At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. ... These were children who grew up cut loose from the web of cousins and great-aunts and family doctors and lifelong neighbors who had traditionally suggested and enforced the society's values. ... They are less in rebellion against society than ignorant of it, able only to feed back certain of its most publicized self-doubts, Vietnam, Saran-Wrap, diet pills, the Bomb.

They feed back exactly what is given to them. Because they do not believe in words--words are for 'typeheads,' Chester Anderson tells them, and a thought which needs words is just one more of those ego trips--their only proficient vocabulary is in the society's platitudes. As it happens I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one's self depends upon one's mastery of the language, and I am not optimistic about children who will settle for saying, to indicate that their mother and father do not live together, that they come from 'a broken home.' They are sixteen, fifteen, fourteen years old, younger all the time, an army of children waiting to be given the words.

The unnerving sense that there is a society out there with no center, at least no center that a traditionalist recognizes as having gravity, and the power to bind you to earth, must be at the root of my anxiety. I remember telling a friend the first time I went to California (to L.A., in 1992) that I had the feeling that I might just float off the edge of the continent, because nothing seemed tethered to anything permanent. That's what I felt even more in northern California -- probably because there is no chance that I'd find SoCal alluring, but the Bay Area is something far more enticing to me.

Don't get me wrong, all the sins of northern California are plain to see here in Texas. But there is still here among Texans a strong sense of sin, of a moral center Whose orbit we can never quite escape collectively. I can see how easy it would be to believe that the Bay Area, about whose beauty I cannot say enough, is Eden. Except there's no such thing. Hence the problem.

Here's the other problem: how do you come from a place as screwed up in many ways as Texas (or Alabama, or Georgia, or any other Red State) and tell people who live in that materialist paradise (I know, I know, Silicon Valley Steve ... a relative paradise, but hang with me here) that they're worse off than they think, and that they should repent? What happens if there is no center, but contra Yeats and Didion, things don't fall apart, not really? What then?

You're imperfect. Now die.

In England, they've been killing babies in their mother's wombs for the crime of having minor, easily correctible birth defects. If the mother should have the right to abort her child up until the point of birth, as she does in the USA (the "mental health of the mother" hole in Roe), then why shouldn't she do this? Why shouldn't mothers abort their unborn children because they are females, as they do in some Asian countries? If unborn life is not sacred, but the mother's choice is, then this practice is morally justified.

Why, as Amy suggests, does no one ask these questions in the MSM?

You watch: if scientists should ever discover a gay gene, homosexuals will be aborted out of existence, just as people with Down syndrome now are being done. Good liberals will justify their decision as a merciful one, saying it is wrong to bring a gay child into this world of bigotry (maybe they'll even believe it themselves). And the only people fighting to stop this crime against humanity will be Catholics and other pro-life Christians.

No muss, no fuss

William Saletan says we ought to quit killing the meat we eat, and instead grow our London broils in test tubes. Reader Jason, who brought this to my attention, writes, "This guy, with ideas like this and his marriage 'solutions' is about as far from sacramentality as one could get."

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan thinks Saletan is onto something. What do you think?

The Republican Congress: Officially Crazy

I know I'm late to the story, but the reaction of the Republican-led Congress to the FBI's raid on Rep. William Jefferson's office is flat-out berserk. This Congress has rolled over like a neutered golden lab in the face of the executive branch's expansion of power post-9/11. It had nothing to say when the Boston Globe reported that Bush essentially reserved the right to himself to enforce only those portions of laws that he agreed with -- in other words, effectively vetoing them without giving Congress the chance to override. But when one of their own members (who happens to be a Democrat) gets his rear end in a crack with the FBI in a bribery investigation, boy oh boy, then it's time for the Republicans to take a bold and principled stand against the alleged overreach of the executive branch.

What hooey. I completely agree with Andy McCarthy at NRO today, who said Congress in this instance is not defending its rights, but "perverting a privilege." And all good on Attorney General Gonzales and his team for threatening to resign if President Bush had returned lawfully seized evidence to Congress. Not all Capitol Hill Republicans have lost their minds over this issue. Sen. David Vitter of Louisiana said, sensibly enough, "I think this outcry from congressional leaders just looks self-serving and defensive to the American people." Yeah you right, Senator. Your House colleagues are essentially arguing that the offices of members of Congress are sacrosanct, not subject to the reach of the law -- even though in this case, the FBI had to establish probable cause to search Rep. Jefferson's office.

The House GOP will have to explain to voters why it believes that members of Congress should have privileges to be exempt from criminal search of their offices when ordinary people don't. Don't get me wrong, I think the Congress ought to have been standing up to executive branch overreaching ... but this is a sorry place to make a stand.

How New Orleans was lost

Here's a pretty great graphic presentation from the Times-Picayune showing how the flooding of New Orleans unfolded.

What matters to Bishop Brown

Ah, so, back from the temporal sunshine of a spotless vacation, and once again into the real-world breach. What the heck is going on in the Catholic Diocese of Orange? This is a place where the idea of "mortal sin" has been a bizarre and alien concept for decades, but now it's being invoked against those bumptious heretics who have the temerity to kneel during Mass? It boggles the mind. TMatt discusses coverage on Get Religion, noting correctly that this is a huge story that's "about" more than it's about.

The twist here is that orthodox believers know quite well that the bishop and the pastor are abusing their (the orthodox') fidelity to Church teaching and legitimate authority to force them to toe the line. The orthodox are in a quandary here, because they are the first to complain about bishops not using their authority to enforce standards. Don't get me wrong, I find Church officials' behavior appalling here, especially because a well-informed source tells me that the previous pastor was a highly orthodox and dynamic priest who built a thriving parish on tradition and Catholic orthodoxy. Some bishops see that kind of success as a threat (we had a similar thing happen in Dallas a couple of years ago), one that must be arrested. With all the problems going on in the Catholic Church today, is it really the case that kneeling during the consecration must be crushed, on pain of mortal sin? This is a real scandal. What kind of witness does it send to young Catholics, or those who might consider the Catholic faith, that the hierarchy -- well, at least Bishop Tod Brown -- is publicly willing to deny Catholics the sacraments not for, say, living together in a sexual relationship outside of wedlock, or supporting the murder of unborn children, or any other grave sin. But kneeling during the consecration? Off with their heads!

Home

I so admire my friend P., an immigrant who is living out his dream of starting and running his own business in Silicon Valley. America was built on the vision and drive of men like him. We talked at length about how this modern world and its economy gave both of us opportunities to follow our vocational dreams that our fathers and mothers couldn't have imagined. Both sets of parents still live in the small towns -- in France and Louisiana, respectively -- where they were born. It would have been impossible for P. and I to have accomplished what we've done professionally had we remained at home. And yet, here we both are, in our late thirties and with families of our own to raise, counting up the cost of being so far away from our families back home.

I told P. that I had only experienced the pull of home, and my father's intense desire that I live there and raise my family there, as oppressive. But when I had my first child, things got a lot more complicated (as I wrote here). Mind you, I couldn't afford to move to my hometown if I wanted to. There is nothing for someone of my skills to do there. It occurs to me as well that many, probably most, of the college-educated young people move away, because ... aside from teachers, there's not a lot vocationally for them to do there. P. and I talked about the psychological shift that took place between our fathers' generation and our own. For our dads, it was assumed that you'd stay in or very close to your hometown, so you'd just have to find something to do there (or perhaps there would be a natural push to diversify the local economy to make room for people with various skills and talents). In our generation, that one would be mobile for the sake of employment was a given. It didn't occur to many of us in my generation that we'd be moving back home; in fact, the possibility of mobility struck many of us -- certainly Your Working Boy -- as liberation.

But now, I'm not so sure. If the choice to move away in search of individual fulfillment is so free and easy, people will make it. I wouldn't want to be bound to the place like my dad was. Yet I perceive a different kind of liberation in the dedication my father has to place. P. and I are doing well in our chosen vocations, and providing amply for our children, but we are both pretty much deracinated. It's striking that I am more likely to find something to talk about with this French guy working in Silicon Valley than I am to do the same thing with a guy from my hometown who works in a factory. There's something wrong with that, isn't it? It destroys any sense of loyalty to place. I am completely given over to the thing I decry and lament. The thought of my own precious children growing up and moving away to New York or Washington, DC -- two places I moved to in my career -- to pursue their vocations is painful to me. Yet I have to give them the same freedom I expected my dad to give me ... and I will have to suffer the same pain of loss that I inflicted on my father.

Meanwhile, our society becomes ever less stable because of this mobility, and people become ever more malleable because they have little or no connection to place. I wrote earlier about my friend I., and how she's a fish out of water as an orthodox Catholic in the Bay Area, but how she can't imagine leaving because ... that is her place. That's honorable, don't you think?

Prosperity

Speaking of staying in touch with reality, it is impossible to be in that part of the country, especially in Silicon Valley, without noticing how incredibly prosperous it is. It really does lend the place a sense of unreality -- the great wealth, plus the perfect climate. Julie and I were talking about the awful state of the Catholic Church there ("Isn't that the university that drove off Father Fessio?"), and Julie observed, "You know, if you lived here, you might genuinely not perceive a need for God." She meant that the wealth and the mild climate, as well as the natural beauty, can give people the illusion that they are totally self-sufficient, and that the stern God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is incompatible with the easygoing lifestyle of the Bay Area. I often wonder why the Christian churches in that part of our world stray so far from orthodoxy. Well, to spend some time there is to feel in your bones why the temptation to apostasy is ever-present. Or so it seems to me. I said to Julie that visiting there is to understand a bit better what Jesus meant when he said that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. You might easily get the feeling that technology and wealth can protect you from anything. Don't get me wrong: there are parts of Dallas that can give you that illusion. But those parts aren't tempting to me in the way that northern California is. Though I wouldn't trade it for the Bay Area, Dallas is oppressively hot and unbeautiful, so there's rarely the chance to mistake it for Paradise.

And yet, there's a whopper of a memento mori running right through the middle of the place. It's called the San Andreas fault. I was admiring a lake at the base of the mountain where we were staying, and P. said, "That was formed by the San Andreas fault. It pretty much runs straight along Highway 280." Oh yeah, that. Everything that the people there have, and have built, could come to ruin in a moment if that fault broke open, which it could do at any moment, without much warning. In a real sense, the prosperity the Bay Area people enjoy is built on a bubble. But isn't that true for all of us? The other day, driving back from the Muir Woods, we heard on the radio that the road from 280 to the top of the mountain, where our hosts live, was blocked because an accident. We took the back way, and arrived just as the police were re-opening the road. We stopped at the country store to pick up some milk, and while Julie ran in, I went over to take a look at the smashed-up motorcycle. Turns out the driver took one of the sharp curves on the winding mountain road too fast, fell off his bike, and was run over by an SUV coming from the opposite direction. The cop didn't know if the man had made it, but he didn't look hopeful. We had passed that way a few hours earlier, and oohed and aahed the whole way down. I couldn't stop looking at that expensive, gorgeous bike, now a ruin, thinking that its owner, who might be dead, cranked it up just a few hours ago and thought about the fun ride he would have up the mountain on the back of his exquisite machine. And now look.

Collyvornia

Well, that was great. Got back last night from our vacation to northern California. Texas never felt so flat nor so hot. The odd thing, at least to me, is that northern California is just about perfect as far as climate and topography is concerned, but I couldn't imagine living there. It feels so culturally alien. I don't mean this disparagingly: we had a fantastic time, and hated to come home so early. It's just that I can't imagine calling that beautiful place home forever. At the end of the day, I really am a Southerner and a cultural conservative. But I do better understand my dear friend I., a native of the area and a devout orthodox Catholic. In most ways, she is culturally at sea in the Bay Area, and certainly in terms of her faith and worship. But she told me when we spent the afternoon talking the other day that she and her husband, who are nearing retirement age, find it impossible to think of living anywhere else, given the natural beauty and all the interesting things to do there. I get that. I really do. But they don't have kids, and they own their own house (that is, they don't have to finance one in an insane real estate market) -- two factors that make the area off limits to people like me.

Still, what a national treasure that part of our country is. We took the kids and went to a state beach park with a picnic lunch (including garlic artichoke bread fresh from the oven, purchased at a general store in the tiny coastal town of Pescadero), and had a great chilly time. The Pacific Coast Highway is jaw-droppingly beautiful. On Saturday, my friend P. and I drove up to Sonoma with our oldest sons in tow, and visited a couple of wineries in the Russian River Valley. This one is pretty much a garage affair, run by a married couple, old friends of P. from the husband's Silicon Valley days, who love wine so much they decided to start making it themselves. Unlike the posher wineries in that part of the country, the tasting room was a couple of card tables set up under a canopy outside the garage. Their wine is very good, by the way, especially their Chardonnay. We stopped at another winery just down the street, another very small affair run by a young guy with a passion for winemaking. I'm not a fan of Zinfandel -- it's usually too big-shouldered for my taste -- but his Zins were absolutely the best I've ever had, and I brought home a couple of bottles.

While we were doing the tasting, I observed the owner, who was spending his Saturday behind the counter in his shorts, pouring the fruits of his labor for visitors, talking with an older couple from down the road who grow grapes. The owner introduced them to one of his buddies, a baby-faced guy who couldn't have been a day older than 28, and told the older couple that his pal was getting into the grape-growing business himself. Maybe it's just me, but I have this idea that winemaking is a rarefied thing, but here I was looking at ordinary people -- young people, even -- who have discovered a passion for this agricultural way of life, and who were devoting themselves to it, and to mastering the art and craft of winemaking. It made me think of my friends the Hales and the Hutchinses, the Evangelical livestock farmers here in Texas, and what an inspiration it is to see people returning to the land to accept a vocation on it.

On the car ride back home, P., who is from the wine-making Loire Valley in France, told me that he always learns something when he goes back home and spends time with grape farmers and wine makers. P. is a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and he's come a long way from his roots. Those grape farmers and wine makers from his home region can't talk about semiconductors, or high-tech advances, or the vagaries of globalism like P. can; but they do know about the rising and setting of the sun, and about the rhythms of life, and all the things that farmers know simply by being farmers , like their fathers and fathers' fathers were. P. said, in so many words, that talking to small farmers who live a traditional life is to confront the difference between knowledge and wisdom. In "Crunchy Cons," the farmer Joel Salatin, if memory serves, told me the same thing: that living close to the land, with the rhythms of nature, keeps one in close touch with reality.

Traveling with children

On the agenda today: 1) Go to the Muir Woods; 2) Go to a winery in Sonoma where they promise to show kids how wineries work; 3) visit a cheese-making shop for same; 4) stop at a Russian Orthodox cathedral in San Francisco to pray before the incorrupt relics of St. John Maximovitch.

With a six-year-old boy and a two-year-old boy in tow.

Well, we made it to the Muir Woods, which is an astonishing place. You can see why people become Druids, is all I'm saying. Seriously, at one point I stopped to pray thanksgiving for these trees, and those who saved them, and who care for them now. To be in the presence of those ancient creatures is to feel the natural piety that traditionalist conservatives say a proper understanding of man's relationship to nature will inspire. It was T.S. Eliot who said that all problems relating to nature are ultimately problems relating to God. It's amazing to think that if not for the naturalist John Muir, President Theodore Roosevelt, and others, this magnificent, old-growth redwood forest would have gone the way of all the others like it on the coast: into the sawmill. Muir, who founded the Sierra Club, famously wrote:

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed - chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides....God has cared for these trees, saved them...but he cannot save them from fools -- only Uncle Sam can do that.

Driving up to our friends' house, north on Hwy 280 from the San Jose Airport, Julie commented on how stunningly beautiful the countryside is along the freeway, especially because it's not marred by billboards and strip malls selling fast food and the usual crap. Beatrice, our hostess, said that's because the state forbids it. I was reminded of something my friend Irene, a conservative Bay Area Catholic, told me as we were driving down the Pacific Coast Highway the last time I was out here: "We have to thank the liberal enviros for keeping this stuff preserved. If it had been left up to our side, it would have all been paved over and developed."

Anyway, after the Muir Woods, and lunch, our patience with the kids, and theirs with us, came to an end. We figured we had time only to visit the cathedral to pray before the relics of St. John Maximovitch. I was deeply moved. Matthew said later he thought the saint's brown, withered hands were scary. Yeah, I guess a six-year-old would think that. Maybe you don't have to be six to think that. But I love signs of the miraculous, and find them inspiring. I attribute it wholly to the intercession of St. John that I didn't pull the car over on the way home and strip those two little heathens to the roof so we could make it through rush hour traffic in peace.

Postcard from paradise

As I often tell friends, I have every expectation of gaining heaven sooner than I otherwise might have, because I live through the Purgatory of summer in Dallas. Did you know it hit 100 degrees two days this past April? "Summer" begins in April and doesn't really end till late October. Gloom! Despair! Agony on me!

Well, I'm writing this morning from atop some mini-mountain in northern California, above Silicon Valley, where we're staying with old friends for a few days. It's 60 degrees and cool outside. There could be marauding bands of Wahhabi Sasquatches lurking at the base of the mountain (hill, whatever: anything taller than a traffic bump is considered a mountain in flat north Texas) and it could not disturb my tranquillity. Today, we're off with the chirren to the Muir Woods, where I intend to get in touch with my inner Ent. And then to a small winery, and a cheesemaking operation. And then to an Orthodox cathedral in San Francisco to see the relics of St. John Maximovitch. My idea of a vacation, I tell ya!

Goodbye, Key West

OK, so the conference just ended, and Your Working Boy is out of here, headed back to Dallas. I'll be in the Bay Area for the rest of the week, so blogging will be light (okay, lightish), but colorful, I'm sure.

Politics and culture

John Siniff of USA Today asks Hunter to expand on his statement that what conservatives have gained in politics they've lost culturally.

Hunter says Evangelicals have been playing a defensive game in this conflict. Their defense has been a political one. They say to themselves if we can just get our person into the White House, our people onto the Supreme Court, and so on, we can halt this slippery slide into a kind of libertarian decadence. They are trying to hold back something that is taking place culturally. Certain vulgarization of popular entertainment, the disintegration of the family -- "they've become extremely sophisticated in how to mobilize money, people and other resources to achieve those political ends."

But culture is more important than politics, says Hunter, and it seems to him that the culture, especially among cultural elites, had come to a consensus about the legitimacy of homosexuality and gay marriage far earlier than any kind of legislation or court decisions that would ratify that consensus. So politics is a short-term solution, and because it's a short-term solution, it's not really a solution. "Nothing is challenging what I think is an already established consensus among cultural elites for the kinds of things that Evangelicals and other religious conservatives really find worrisome."

Mike Cromartie objects to Hunter, saying he wouldn't called a political solution a "failed solution" for civil rights laws. Hunter replies: there's an underlying narrative in our culture, at the deepest levels, about freedom. Brown v. Board and a lot of the civil rights legislation, and the court decisions, were all ahead of the culture and public opinion -- but it was still part of this narrative move. And that is part of the success of the gay rights movement -- they have tapped into this deep narrative flow in American culture, so that when conservatives challenge gay rights, it sounds like they're against freedom. "And that's a losing proposition."

Wolfe adds that he's surprised to keep seeing that issues involving the body and sexuality are far more important to conservative Christians than other issues, such as poverty and torture. For these Christians, this is not just cherry-picking, Wolfe admits; this is a profoundly serious concern, especially when it comes to raising children in this culture.

"The idea, however, that this is the fault of liberals is going to be an increasingly problematic [point of view] in the future," Wolfe said. How much longer can you blame liberals if the government is run by conservatives? he added. How can you account for the fact that divorce rates and other indicators of cultural breakdown are as high or higher in Red America than Blue America?

"At some point, you have to ask, 'Is something wrong with us? Is something wrong with the way we are raising our children?' And this is what I mean by the turning away from politics," Wolfe adds. "At some point, it's got to come home [for conservatives.]"

(This is the first thing Wolfe has said all morning that I agree wholeheartedly with!)

War, and "war"

Alan Wolfe is passionate this morning about the inappropriateness of using the term "war" to describe American politics. The language itself is hyperbolic, he says, and forces us to conceive of normal politics as being at each other's throats. Wolfe says that using the word "war" to describe politics undermines the need to respect rules for the sake of reaching political consensus. Politics is not supposed to be civil war by other means.

Hunter responded by saying that the Civil War, when it broke out, was preceded for 30 years of arguing over the culture-war issues that the shooting war was ultimately fought over. "Real wars don't always follow culture wars, but you never have a real war without a prior culture war."

This is something that a democracy, especially in context of a post-Enlightenment world, needs to pay attention to, says Hunter. "Culture wars become especially bloody over one issue, and that is: who is a member of the political community? Who is a member of a common community, and therefore worthy of its protections? You start excluding people, and culture wars tend to become violent wars. You see this in all sorts of cases historically."

A questioner replied that there is nothing today like the issue of slavery, which was at the moral heart of the Civil War. Replies Hunter: Au contraire -- there's a reason why abortion has been at the center of the culture war for the past 30 years.

A common culture?

The culture war is fueled by radically different concepts of authority. I asked about the Alasdair MacIntyre view that you cannot have a cohesive society without a commonly shared morality. Given the radical individualism of American society, are we headed toward a political situation in America in which people feel not loyal to their country, but merely obedient to our government?

Wolfe says MacIntyre's "After Virtue" is a poetic book, "but there's not one grain of truth in it." Hunter says that American society is in fact fragmenting, and not because we have to have a common religion. He says, "My sense of the center is that it isn't coherent, it isn't vibrant, and that they're all sorts of other things going on, including the commodification and politicization of everything -- and that this is deeply problematic for whatever center we would hope to emerge."

"At the end of the day, authority, it seems to me -- in my most pessimistic moments, I sense that authority is devolving into power," he continues. "I see that again with the increase in law. It's a straightforward measure. Law is the language of the state, and the state is many things, but at the end of the day, the state is about coercion. It seems to me that opponents in the culture war appeal to law so quickly because what they're doing is appealing to the patronage of the state. And when you have the patronage of the state, it means you don't need a moral consensus: you force it."

Hunter on Evangelical disaffection

The trajectory of Evangelicals in America for the past 150 years has been a movement from the center to the periphery, says Hunter. So much of the religious politics of the 20th century, from Scopes to the present, has been an attempt to find some place within the center, or to defend its place within the center. Hunter's sense is that Evangelicals in particular, especially on issues having to do with the family, they feel so marginalized, and politics have been such a failure to achieve the aims that they want, that they will be disaffected from politics altogether. That's a real possibility.

Why should Evangelicals lay down power?

The question is put to Wolfe: Why would you think that conservative Protestants, having spent 40 years building a powerful political machine, would abandon it?

Because, says Wolfe, its leaders are having an epiphany about what their role as Christians in this culture are supposed to be, and to do. Leaders like Rick Warren are genuinely more interested in fighting poverty and relieving suffering, not fighting in the political realm. There is an authentic re-thinking of Christian mission, of Christian public purpose, among the younger generation of Evangelical leaders.

The coming Evangelical Left

Hunter says that because Evangelicalism is more and more defined by emotional experience, a nascent Evangelical political progressivism is easy to foresee. You can see this especially among the emerging Evangelical elites. Says Hunter, "Most of the Evangelicals I know at the University of Virginia, I only know one who voted for Bush in the last election."

Re: Culture Wars

Hunter says cultural conservatives, like everyone else, has sought political solutions to the issues that trouble them the most: abortion, gay marriage, school issues, etc. "It is precisely because they have chosen a political strategy, which is in effect a short-term strategy primarily about the instrumentality of power rather than the kind of foundational normative consensus-building, that I think [explains why] conservatives are going to lose. Alan is exactly right [when he says] that conservatives have done extremely well mobilizing within the Republican Party, [but] these are short-term successes. While they have gained in politics, they have lost in the culture, and it is precisely for that reason that they will lose politics as well."

Hunter says the bigger question is not about polarization, but about the center itself. To say that conflict is not the main story is not the same thing as saying that citizens are becoming civic-minded, or that civic participation is increasing, or that concern for the most vulnerable is increasing. "My sense is that what is referred to as the center is a statistical phenomenon," Hunter says. "It is not rooted in common political ideals. It is not motivated in those ways. ... The center is not clear and purposeful."

Culture Wars: Alan Wolfe

In his response, Alan Wolfe says that Hunter doesn't give as much attention as he ought to surveys, to how ordinary people think about the world and their culture. In his book "One Nation, After All," Wolfe argued that the culture war was a conflict among elites that didn't have nearly as much to do with daily life as normal people live it. The conflict between traditionalists and modernist libertarians posited by culture warriors is really something within each American, not just a Red State vs. Blue State phenomenon.

Cultural values are not fixed. For example, when Roe v. Wade came down in 1973, the Southern Baptist Convention endorsed the decision. Why? For one, they knew that Catholics were opposed to abortion, and in those days, there was a knee-jerk reaction against Catholic attitudes. For another, the Baptists have always had a very strong sense of the importance of separating church and state. These views lined them up behind the Roe decision. Ten years later, they repudiated their support.

"If this notion of the right to life is so culturally embedded, if it's supposed to have such deep religious roots, if it's supposed to be one of these timeless things ... how can it possibly change so radically?" Wolfe asks. He says the answer is that politics came to matter more to the Southern Baptists than religion: that how you responded to a decision of SCOTUS defined a Southern Baptist's theological views, not the other way around.

It was a huge step for conservative Protestantism in the United States, he says, to become more theocratic. Wolfe predicts a return among conservative Protestants to its historic stance of withdrawal, or at least skepticism, of politics. Conservative Protestants will be rethinking how their religiosity has been corrupted by identifying too closely with politics.

Wolfe says the most important insight from Hunter's work is that in recent times, conservatives within each religious tradition (Catholics, Protestants, Jews) found they had more in common with each other than within liberals of their own traditions. "All you have to do now is look at the Episcopal Church to see that," Wolfe said. But Wolfe says he doesn't think this situation will hold; he predicts a return to traditional religious divisions -- that Catholics in general will be more hostile to Protestants, and so forth.

Wolfe contends that at the elite level, conservative Catholics and Protestants are actually beginning to move farther apart. Look at the Supreme Court: conservative presidents have reached to Catholic legal intellectuals to sit on the Supreme Court. Richard John Neuhaus is a key figure here; in Wolfe's view, Neuhaus sees his role as to galvanize the Catholic intellectual resources to provide the intellectual heavy lifting that Evangelicals can't provide. Evangelicals, says Wolfe, have long been insecure about their intellectual accomplishments. Wolfe sees some tensions emerging on that point.

Conservative Protestants have been best friends with the state of Israel for a generation or so, but Jewish leaders are warning that their friendship is deceptive -- that there's no difference between Christian philosemitism and antisemitism. Evangelicals really want to convert them, the idea goes. Abe Foxman of the ADL came to Boston College to speak on this theme, recently, and (says Wolfe) the Jews in the audience were unpersuaded -- not because they have much trust in Christian intentions, but because they see Muslims as so much more of a threat to Jews that they see it as foolish to worry about Evangelicals.

Finally, Wolfe says that if religions are re-emerging with a sense of mistrust among one another, there is a growing appreciation for particular religious sensibilities within the broader churches. He says that on Boston College's campus, there's a strong and distinct Catholic sensibility whether or not the Catholic students count themselves as liberal or conservative. For example, the most conservative C atholics are always going to be queasy about the kind of economic policies that conservative Evangelicals embrace with no problem. And Catholics, no matter how liberal, are always going to have difficulty accepting abortion without restrictions, as liberal secularists do.

Culture Wars: James Davison Hunter

The last session begins with two sociologists on opposite sides of the culture war question -- that is, the question "Is there a culture war?" Alan Wolfe says no, there's not; James Davison Hunter says yes there is. Hunter is first out of the box to explain his view of why we're still fighting a culture war.

"Politics is sexier than culture ... but culture is more profound than politics," says Hunter. "It's prior to, and it leads, politics. And therefore it is more important than politics in tracking the nature of the social order, and its changes."

Traditionally in the social sciences, it was believed that culture is the sum total of values and beliefs held by individuals. But it became clear by the end of the 1970s that this definition was too limited. Sociologists started to focus on the institutions and artifacts of culture -- things like public narratives, symbols, collective identity, and so forth. You can't easily discern these things through survey data, however -- which in Hunter's view is where Alan Wolfe goes wrong.

"The bottom line is that every single one of the criticisms of the culture war hypothesis has been based on survey data," Hunter says -- and therefore missing something crucial about the nature of culture and cultural conflict. Hunter says he focuses on public discourse -- "a discourse of elites" -- and how the discourse gets polarized among the institutions in our society.

Second point: if you analyze the culture war in terms of survey data, you have to know where to look for conflict. On each side, five to seven percent of either side of a controversial issue represent "the white-hot core." These are the highly motivated activists. Beyond that, there are probably 12 to 15 percent on each end that "lean strongly, but are less motivated." And beyond that, there is another 20 percent, more or less, who tilt one way or the other -- and in an election, likely turn one way or another depending on the issues. The elites are the ones to pay particular attention to because of "the disproportionate role they play in framing public discussions," says Hunter. "It's their soundbites that frame the debate. From my vantage point, the heart of culture is the power to define reality, and that power resides primarily among the elites."

Culture by its very nature is contested. "Where there is culture, there is struggle," said Philip Rieff. Culture is the form of fighting before the fighting begins. The bloodiest conflicts are conflicts over symbols. Hunter says that the "frameworks of meaning" that help us understand conflicts are where the real struggle is happening.

Spengler: UK headed to religious war

You must read Spengler's review of the Melanie Phillips' book "Londonistan". I have not yet read this book, but I respect Phillips enormously for having the courage to try to see things clearly, and not to do the usual Western journalistic thing and avoid seeing things that might lead one to dire conclusions. Spengler writes:

Revulsion and contempt color Muslim attitudes toward the British leftists who most desire to appease them. That is not a recipe for co-existence but for escalation, as last year's subway bombings should have made clear. But the issue now is not terrorism but rather outright war.

[snip]

Melanie Phillips' book comes too late, for it reports a set of circumstances shortly to be overthrown by events. She is writing about 1938, and we are entering 1939, when the West will have to respond to an external challenge in a way that it never could to an internal threat. Britain will have the religious war it sought to dodge.

Feliciana!

Over at Reactionary Radicals, Clark Stooksbury, who reviewed "Crunchy Cons", mentions Walker Percy's setting novels in his fictional "Feliciana Parish." Percy's Feliciana was in real life West Feliciana Parish, which is my home parish. Beautiful place, just beautiful, and full of wonderful eccentrics. Among them was my late Uncle Murphy. He founded the Bopotomus Festival, a festival for a fictional animal (it was mostly an excuse to have the Bopotomus Ball). He tricked the local newspaper into publishing a wedding announcement for a friend to Miss Flossie Labrador, a dog. When his hog, Bertha Butt, was stolen by his buddies as part of a practical joke, he never gave the slightest indication that he noticed La Butt was missing. After several months, his friends got sick and tired of boarding a hog, and returned her.

But his greatest feat was winning a tombstone in a bourre' game with an undertaker. The guy paid his gambling debt by creating the headstone that would one day rest at the head of Murphy's grave. When I was a kid and we'd go visit him, we'd have to walk by the creepy thing outside his front door. At night, he'd go out and pee on it, which, come to think of it, was precisely the right thing to do. When he died in 1987, his kids knew they had to honor Murphy's wish to deploy that tombstone, with the epitaph that Murphy had chosen for himself.

To this day, you can stop at the Starhill Cemetery and visit Murphy's grave. The epitaph:

MURPHY A. DREHER, JR.
1932-1987
This ain't bad, once you get used to it

I don't know if he'd qualify as a Reactionary Radical, but he sure was a lot of fun -- and exemplary of the sort of marvelous eccentrics south Louisiana produces.

Gay marriage, religion and the Dems

I brought up to Bill Galston just now Maggie Gallagher's recent Weekly Standard cover story, in which she reports on how legal scholars on both sides of the gay marriage debate foresee a coming train wreck between religious liberty and gay marriage rights. I asked Bill what he thought about it. He said he hadn't read the piece, but that there's "no question" that if the courts put gay rights on the same plane as race, "that would produce an explosion, and in my judgment, a justified explosion."

He doesn't, however, think that it will come to this. "If I were a Supreme Court justice wondering how I could best blow my branch of government out of the water, and empower my worst enemies in Congress...that would be the way to do it. I don't think they will do it."

I think he's right that it would be an explosion of tectonic magnitude, but I am not at all persuaded that SCOTUS wouldn't do it. Among many, and I'd guess most, journalists, the equality between race and sexuality in terms of legal equality is obvious. And if that's the case, allowing a religious institution to discriminate without penalty against gays is as impermissible as allowing them to discriminate against people on the basis of race. Bob Jones University lost its religious tax-exempt status because of its segregationist policies. Why couldn't this happen to religious institutions on homosexuality? If you do believe gay marriage rights are a fundamental issue of justice, then it becomes very hard to say that as a practical political matter, it shouldn't be pressed through the courts to its natural conclusion -- namely, a same-sex marriage version of Brown v. Board of Education.

Democrats and the courts

Bill Galston, a longtime Democratic strategist, says that the Democratic Party's behavior in the two recent SCOTUS nominations was "close to disgraceful," especially on the Alito nomination. "That, quite frankly, represents the Democratic Party at its worst."

There is an increasing tendency of the party to rely on "strategies of litigation rather than strategies of mobilization." The Democratic party's reliance on the former has eroded small-d democracy because Democrats have been satisfied to win a majority on a court panel, not among the people. Barney Frank warned some time ago that gay rights has to be popularly accepted, not imposed on people by courts, says Galston. "In my judgment, the Democratic Party for more than 50 years has been bewitched and led astray by Brown v. Board of Education. It was not a paradigm, but the historical exception." That is, desegregation could be done no other way ... but the problem with the Democrats is they took that as a template for how social change was to be accomplished.

He hopes that his party abandons the litigation strategy, and pours itself into small-d democratic grassroots mobilization.

I share his puzzlement

Ross Douthat wonders:

I'm curious about why so many sensitive, highly-intelligent writers - for whose opinions, on most questions, I have the utmost respect - seem to be so untroubled by America's completely-permissive approach to abortion law. I can understand why smart people are pro-choice; I have a harder time understanding why smart people are so blithe about it, so happy to caricature pro-lifers as women-hating religious fanatics and nothing more, so unwilling to consider any restrictions on what is, however you slice it, a practice that involves doing fatal violence to a form of human life.

I'm sure it has to do with the circles I've long run in because I'm a journalist, but I have found it all but impossible to have serious discussions with pro-choice people about the morality of abortion. They seem to come unhinged, I mean absolutely unhinged, on the topic. I once sat in a restaurant in Adams Morgan in Washington, DC, with three smart Democratic women. We were talking about religion in general, and it came out that I am Catholic; one of the women asked me if I was therefore pro-life. I said yes ... and that was about the last word I got in on the issue. The woman who asked the question turned to her friends and said, serious as a heart attack, "I'm afraid of him." The other two women started yelling at me for being a religious bigot who hates women. I mean literally yelling; I got up and left the restaurant, and that was the end of those friendships. That was an extreme example, but I've found some degree of that over and over again when the issue comes up.

Re: Galston

Continuing the liveblogging ...

Galston says he thinks there are a rising number of religious folks, liberal and conservative, are disappointed and fed up with the way we talk about moral values in our politics. He says,"The first political leader who realizes that the American people are just tired of this debate will pick up a lot of the marbles off the floor."

Galston, who is Jewish, is one of the leading American scholars of Catholic social thought. He says he spends a lot of time among Catholic intellectuals of all kinds, and says the sense of having been thrown "out of the Democratic Party Eden" is profound. "And the abortion issue is at the center of that expulsion. I cannot manage to find a Catholic intellectual who will not in conversation refer to what happened to Bob Casey at the 1992 Democratic convention." Says it's important symbolically that the Dems are trying to right that wrong with the Bob Casey, Jr. candidacy in Pennsylvania.

(Galston mentioned to me yesterday that in reading Rick Santorum's book "It Takes a Family," he was surprised to see that Santorum did not back away from GOP economic dogma, even though it's clear that the free market disrupts traditional family and social arrangements.)

He continued: "I happen to believe the single most important political mistake Bill Clinton made was vetoing the partial-birth abortion ban," Galston says. And the first political party that will arrive at the position that the core of Roe must be defended, but that there is good reason to restrict things around the margins. "As a matter of principle and substance, my party has been poorly postured" on the abortion issue, Galston said, and has to change.

Galston

Galston says that the following events tell the story about the role of religion in American politics over the past 50 years or so:

1. The fall of the informal Protestant establishment. Started in 1960 with election of a Catholic president, followed shortly thereafter by the school prayer decision.

2. The expulsion of urban Catholics from the Democratic Party after McGovern.

3. The Roe v. Wade mobilization. By 1984, both party platforms on abortion had hardened.

4. The Carter disappointment. "I have a feeling that Evangelicals would not have moved so strongly toward the Republican Party as they did if Carter had not teased them and disappointed them. I think that sent the signal that if not even Jimmy Carter can be trusted to hold high the banner, what Democrat could?"

5. The Boomer schism. "I see Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as matter and antimatter, the two basic things that can happen to you if you went to Yale University." This is why things got very different in 1992. The traditional electorate looked at Clinton, the first Boomer, as different from his predecessors among the Democrats.

Where are we right now? Galston sees that one the Religious Right, there's a sense of demoralization and even betrayal. On the Religious Left, there is a "countermobilization question." There are some straws in the wind now, but it can't be predicted if they'll get their act together to be effective politically. But Democrats got slapped awake in 2004, he said, and are finally facing the fact that they've got a big problem with people of faith.

Galston's view is that it won't be enough for Democrats to simply start talking to religious people more, or to change the kind of language that they use to discuss moral issues. Rather, Democrats are going to have to do some real re-thinking about their stands on the kinds of issues that engage the political imagination of religiously active voters. It can't be a difference in style, in other words, but also substance.

Religion, Moral Values and the Democrats

Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution is now presenting a paper on the topic of "Religion, Moral Values and the Democratic Party."

His first topic: What happened with American religion and the 2004 presidential election? Unsurprisingly, the exit data show that as a general matter:

+ the more traditional you were, the more likely you were to vote for Bush
+ the more traditional you were, the more likely you were to turn out to vote
+ the more often you went to church, the more likely you were to vote Bush

For traditionalists, social issues were the most important thing to vote on, but centrists and modernists thought foreign policy was the most important issue.

Here's the key finding, says Galston: Among traditionalist Catholics, there was a huge swing toward Bush, and a huge upswing in voter turnout. Galston says, "The real story of religion in politics in the next few years will be written around Catholics -- persuadable Catholics -- than by mobilizing Evangelical Protestants."

Fear

An editor said that he's had several writers who have expressed an unwillingness to write about this or that aspect of Islam out of fear. The editor asked Prof. Cook if his unwillingness to discuss certain topics this morning without going off the record had anything to do with fear.

Cook brought up one historical fact he mentioned off the record this morning during his lecture, and said of his decision to put that off the record: "I was motivated by fear of retribution. I don't want to get into trouble. But I think to a large extent, the people who don't want to talk about the difficult stuff have internalized the attitude. ... I think people are doing an awful lot of kidding themselves."

Extraordinary. Here we are sitting in the United States of America, and one of the world's leading scholars of historical Islam is (no doubt quite rightly!) afraid to openly discuss various historical facts of early Islam with an audience of journalists, for fear of what might be done to him. Why does this not engage the imaginations and consciences of American journalists? Why are we so afraid? Why is it in Europe, governments are aiding and abetting this silencing of free people by making it possible to charge those who criticize Islam?

Fundamentalism

In a discussion just now of the use of the word "fundamentalism," scholar James Davison Hunter said that there's an important distinction between fundamentalism and orthodoxy. "Fundamentalism, all fundamentalism, is orthodoxy in confrontation with modernity," Hunter said. And all fundamentalists believe that history has gone awry, and it is their duty to make it right.

"The point is it's possible to be orthodox and be attached to the traditions of historical orthodoxy in a given faith tradition without being fundamentalists," Hunter said.

Responded Michael Luo of the New York Times: "But we don't do that."

Re: Muhammad

William Galston began his question by saying that among Jews, although Moses is the highest and most nearly perfect prophet, there are still extensive discussions of his errors and flaws. I think it is a matter of some cultural significance that Moses is depicted as an imperfect being, though the highest prophet. And in Christianity, there has always been a stream in which faith can be seen as a counterweight to worldly authority. And Jewish law arose in a condition in which Judaism was in exile, in minority, so there was never really a case in which Jewish law was a guide for how to run a state.

What strikes me, Galston said, is that Islamic law arose in a condition of political majority. So, can Islamic law ever really be "private" law, or does it have to be public law, and therefore coercive? Galston brought up two examples: 1) we in the West have the right to change religions; Islam forbids that; 2) it is not clear to me that Islamic law can accomodate the core of what believes to be non-negotiable about gender relations.

Cook's response: there are parts of the Koran in which God is telling off His Prophet. Muhammad was not perfect, and in that sense, it's similar to the Biblical account of Moses. Even the greatest prophet is flawed. But over the course of the centuries, the doctrine developed that prophets possess immunity to sin or error. Different people asserted it in different ways: they can be totally immune, or immune only in matters of faith and morals, etc. There's no question that the drift over the course of Islamic history is toward a stronger and stronger assertion of prophetic immunity. "It creates enormous problems when confronted with evidence from the earliest stories," he said. For example, there is an account in the life of the Prophet that says while the Prophet was still in Mecca, he was unhappy that he was on bad terms with pagan tribesmen. He wanted everyone to be friend. On one occasion, while receiving a revelation, he allowed Satan to get him to insert a verse that came from Satan into the Scripture, which basically said to the pagan Meccans, "My God is okay, your God is okay, and we can all get along." Then, according to the accounts, the Archangel Gabriel came down from heaven and straightened him out -- and then God knocked the offending verse out of the revelation, and all was well. The point is, the Prophet compromised himself -- and this conflicts with the doctrine of prophetic immunity, which the modern Islamic fundamentalists have made an absolute value.

On the matter of public and private law, Cook said that with some modifications, he accepts Galston's distinction. It is true that on religious pluralism and gender relations, those are points of great friction with the West. "How is this likely to play out?" Cook said. "...As long as you have fundamentalism riding high, and you take all this stuff with the religious law seriously, you've got an insoluble problem."

But look at Hindu law, Cook said, which is at least as rigid about gender roles as Islamic law. In modern India, though, Hindu law is a dead letter on gender relations. Same in Israel. Cook said that this could happen with Islam.

"Yes, but how does this happen?" I asked. "This is not an abstract question. It's very real for Europe right now."

Responded Cook: "That's one of the privileges of being an academic. You don't have to make policy recommendations."

Well, okay ... but it seems to me that we are down, then, to power politics. Pim Fortuyn was right: as Muslim populations grow in the West, and to the extent that individual Muslims believe, as the Islamists do, that Islamic law should rule society, they are a direct threat to the liberal democratic order. And to the extent that Muslims accept the liberal democratic order, they are losing their religion as it has been historically practiced -- which is what the Islamists say, of course. This goes right back to the question of the unity of mosque- and-state in Islam, and how it is possible -- if it is possible -- to adapt Islam to liberal democracy, which implies accepting secularity and pluralism.

Forty percent of Muslims in Britain polled earlier this year want Britain governed by Islamic law, at least in Muslim areas. Four out of 10. Think about that.

Re: Muhammad

Someone asked Cook about the role of jihad in Islam, framing it as the question,, "Is Islam inherently violent?" His answer, in effect, was, "Yes, but you can minimize or maximize the degree to which it is violent." He explained that there's a difference between defensive jihad and offensive jihad (offensive in the sense of going to attack communities of infidels who do not threaten Muslims). Cook said that in Islamic law, there is a sense that as long as some Muslims somewhere are waging offensive jihad, it is not compulsive for all Muslims. Cook said it is possible to read the Koran and conclude that offensive jihad is not justified, but the Koran is not the same thing as Islamic law.

I asked about liberal democracy and Islam. Given how, on Cook's account, mosque-and-state are so intimately connected from the very beginning, how can we in the West expect Muslim populations to accept our post-Enlightenment political structure and categories, which call for the separation of church and state? Don't Islamists have a point when they say that the more like liberal democrats Muslims become, the less authentically Islamic they are?

Prof. Cook said that despite the theoretical unity of mosque-and-state, for most of Islamic history they have been separate. So it can be done. And he pointed out that Christianity was for most of its history opposed to liberal democracy as we know it today. I responded by saying that you cannot find in foundational Christian scripture a dogmatic assertion of the unity of religion and politics (in fact, quite the opposite -- "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's..."). That's not the case in Islam. I think the Islamists have a point -- and that if Islamic fundamentalism is to be discredited, it has to be done on the basis of theological arguments grounded in Muslim scripture. Cook said that Islamic fundamentalism, if it is to be discredited, will not be done through "clever arguments," but through some other means.

Cook added that when people say Islam needs a Reformation, they should keep in mind that the Christian Reformation ushered in a time of bloodshed and fanaticism -- and we should not wish that on the Muslim world. In fact, he said, "Wahhabism is the Muslim Reformation -- and we hate that."

Re: Muhammad

The important thing to get, Cook says, is that Muhammad created both a religion and a state. What Muhammad did was get the Arabs together on the same page. If you could do that, you could send them out to conquer the world. "And that's what they did, starting in 634," Cook says. "They never did it before, they never did it again, and Muhammad in his dual role as prophet and politician made it happen."

Unlike early Christianity, in which for three centuries Christianity was a religion of a persecuted minority, Islam took off like a rocket from early on. The audience for the Gospels were people concerned about their salvation, but the audience for the stories the early Muslims told about the Prophet and his works were for people interested in political and military matters. That matters a very great deal when thinking about why Islam succeeded so brilliantly in temporal matters, at least early on. Essentially, Muhammad was able to harness the incredible cultural energy of the Arab tribes, and direct it outward. It was impossible to separate the religious message from its political and military uses.

John Dickerson of Slate just asked Prof. Cook's opinion on the commonly held belief in America that Osama bin Laden has horribly perverted a great religion. Cook responded by saying that right after 9/11, Karen Armstrong published an essay saying that Osama had hijacked a great religion. Says Cook: "I don't buy that for a minute. There are things present in this heritage that Osama bin Laden can legitimately use." He said it's a matter of dispute among Muslims and others how much of Osama's agenda is legitimately Muslim, but to say that everything Osama prescribes is against Islam is simply untrue.

Why Muhammad matters

Greetings from Key West, where as I blogged last night, I'm attending a conference sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. We're about to hear a lecture on what Muhammad accomplished and why it matters. The lecturer is
Michael Cook, one of the leading authorities in the world on Islam, who teaches at Princeton; in fact, he holds the chair once held by his mentor, Bernard Lewis. The lecture is about to begin. I'll liveblog throughout.

"Just about everything I'm going to talk about will be about events that occurred in the 7th century," Prof. Cook said. "But don't get the idea that what I'm talking about is not relevant. In some ways, it's extremely relevant."

Downs

"We don't know what we'd do without him - he's so adored," says the mother of a Down Syndrome child in England, who was encouraged to abort her baby at 35 weeks after his handicap was detected. The story makes no mention of the religious beliefs, if any, of these parents, but it did bring to mind something a friend of mine said the other day: "Whenever I see someone who has a Down's child, I assume they're Catholic." She meant it as a compliment, which is exactly how I took it. It said: Catholics will welcome life however it comes. We are not eugenicists.

Americans will believe anything

Every time I hear someone lamenting the faithlessness of Europe, versus the supposed faithfulness of America, I think, "It ain't necessarily so." In that vein, Tim Rutten, the media columnist for the LA Times, speaks the truth. Excerpt from his column about "The Da Vinci Code":

Actually, there is an interesting story about religion in America here, but it isn't one that lends itself to the standard-issue, good-guys-and-bad guys, talk-show formulation.

So far, "The Da Vinci Code" has sold 60.5 million copies, 21.7 million of them in the United States. We're frequently reminded that America is the most religious country in the developed world, with churchgoing rates unrecorded in any other Western nation for decades. Moreover, militantly assertive Christianity has become a political force demanding to be heard from the corridors of the Capitol to the local school board

So, who's buying this book? Are there really that many secular humanists who don't care whether their prose has pronouns with antecedents?

Actually, the attitudes that make Americans so "religious" are the same ones that have made them such a ready market for the "Da Vinci" flimflam. This country is suffused with religious sentiments and impulses, but Americans are abysmally — even willfully — short on religious knowledge. All the periodic hand-wringing over this country's crisis of faith or creeping secularism notwithstanding, the problem with Americans is not that they don't believe anything; it's that so many think they can believe anything — and that believing one thing doesn't preclude belief in another.

You can't go to a dinner party nowadays without encountering somebody who describes himself as "spiritual" — whatever that means. (Tell the truth: Haven't you ever wanted to throttle somebody who tells you how they made over their yoga studio to include a "meditation altar" with crystals, Buddha and Virgin of Guadalupe icon?) Americans are religious because they've come to treat belief as an adjunct to the consumer society, sort of like the potato chip aisle in the local grocery.

In such an inner landscape, why not entertain the possibility that Jesus scored? After all, it could have happened.

Pitiful. Just pitiful.

See, this is why the Religious Left is not about to amount to anything. These folks are so sold out to pluralism that they cannot affirm anything as true, except the dogma that "the Religious Right is wrong." Good luck building a movement around that, y'all. This excerpt from that NYTimes story is so very, very telling:

Mr. Campolo, the Baptist minister, explained to the participants in a seminar that many people on Capitol Hill were religious, and that to reach them and to establish authority, liberals should rely on the Bible.

"You have no right to be a spiritual leader if you haven't read Scripture," he told the group. "People in Congress respect the Book, even if they don't know what it says. If we don't recognize this, we don't know squat."

A young man with long hair and a tunic challenged Mr. Campolo.

"I thought this was a spiritual progressives' conference," he said. "I don't want to play the game of 'the Bible says this or that,' or that we get validation from something other than ourselves. We should be speaking from our hearts."

Pure sentimental mush. It has no power to bind anybody, which means it has no power to inspire. Can you imagine Martin Luther King Jr. saying, "I don't want to play the game of 'the Bible says this or that.'?" Can you imagine facing Bull Connor and the police dogs, much less Diocletian, with that bucket-of-warm-spit stuff? Come on!

The St. Leibowitz Library

I don't know about you, but when I think "religion and public life," the first words that come to mind after that are "Key West." Ahem. Which makes it fitting that I'm writing tonight from Key West, where the Pew Forum is holding a two-day conference on, yes, religion and public life. Lots of good stuff planned here, which I'll be blogging on as soon as I get the ruling on what's on the record, and what's off.

On the way here, though, I started reading "A Canticle for Leibowitz," the 1959 sci-fi novel set in a post-nuclear apocalypse world in which monks are trying to preserve the wisdom of the past for a renewal at the end of the Dark Age, and people of the future are seeking to gain knowledge for bad ends. Someone recommended it to me the other night at the Spence dinner, given my interest in Benedictine monasticism during the Dark Ages, and I finally decided to take the worn secondhand paperback off my shelf and read the thing.

Well, it's a fantastic book. The Leibowitzian monks consider it their mission to preserve what fragments of written knowledge they can put together for the sake of the future. It made me wonder what books I would say would be necessary to preserve so people of a post-apocalyptic future could know from reading them what it meant to be human. To be good, and sane, and to live in truth. What do you think? Let's suggest volumes for the St. Leibowitz Abbey library. Assume that the Bible is already there, and volumes that teach practical things like health care and basic repair principles. I want to know which books you think are the most important to convey to generations in the future who will have lost all knowledge of our civilization what's important to know to reconstitute it.

Apes and swine

Remember the claims made by the Saudis that they'd cleaned up their wicked textbooks? Freedom House's Nina Shea, writing in today's WaPo, says it isn't true. Here are examples of what they found in recent, supposedly cleaned-up, Saudi textbooks:

"As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus." (8th grade)

"The clash between this [Muslim] community (umma) and the Jews and Christians has endured, and it will continue as long as God wills. ... It is part of God's wisdom that the struggle between the Muslim and the Jews should continue until the hour [of judgment]." (9th grade)

"Jihad in the path of God -- which consists of battling against unbelief, oppression, injustice, and those who perpetrate it -- is the summit of Islam." (12th grade)

My strong conviction is that we Americans will continue to ignore the importance of this sort of thing until we have another 9/11.

The depths of things

Reader Conor just sent in this bit from John Allen's latest Word from Rome column (which I can't link to with the version of Blogger software I'm working with this morning). It has to do with the Catholic philosopher David Schindler of the John Paul II Center. The following is from the column:
---
By that, Schindler seemed to have in mind the question of whether laity are adequately aware of the ways in which modern liberal culture may shape them in ways not always compatible with their Christian vocation.

"The tendency is to get involved with the world as it is, accepting most things, but drawing the line at abortion or something like that," Schindler said. "We think of the structures of liberal culture as given, and then we try to give them a religious intentionality."

That, he said, is not enough.

"Liberal institutions make ideological claims," he said. Even Catholics well educated in the faith, he said, often aren't aware of how "their categories are liberal categories."

Offering a small example, Schindler pointed to technology, often a fetish of liberalism. He said he's taken the Internet out of his home.

"It encourages us to communicate without seriousness, because of the immediacy," he said. "Everything has a surface quality."

In essence, what Schindler seemed to be calling for is a more "counter-cultural" laity, not just with respect to a handful of life issues, but capable of a much deeper criticism of 21st century secularity.

Schindler acknowledged that some people might see this as "imposing" a religious or theological framework on secular realities.

"But the inner meaning of every reality is love," he said, "and love has a logic. It's not a matter of importing a foreign logic from outside, but rather reaching in to the depths of things."

Loss

It occurred to me last evening that when my father, who is 71, dies, an entire body of knowledge will die with him. He grew up in the rural South during the Great Depression. He can do any practical thing. He knows how to grow anything, how to kill and skin wild game, how to fix engines, how to fix plumbing, how to repair things around the house, how to maintain cars and power machinery, how to find water underground ... I could go on. He was the first in his family to go to college, and worked in a civil servant's job for his first career, and after retiring from that taught himself computer mapping, and will later this year retire from his second career as a creator of map databases. He is very far from a simple farmer. He believed that any self-respecting man should know how to be as self-reliant as possible; he never believed that having an advanced education excused one from knowing how to do practical things. He thinks it is degrading for men to be utterly dependent on others with specialized knowledge unless one had no choice.

When I was growing up, he kept trying to teach me his practical skills and knowledge, but I didn't want to learn. I was bored by it. It didn't come naturally to me. I knew from an early age that I wasn't going to live on the farm, so why bother? Nowadays, whenever I have to pay somebody to fix the washing machine, or change the oil in the car, I think about this. But in truth, as a writer who works long days and even on weekends to do freelance projects, there is a more remunerative way to spend my time than doing chores I could pay someone else to do. It makes more sense for me to take the car to the 15-minute oil change shop so I can do something that pays off for my family.

But my dad would say: that's not the point. The fact that you can't change your oil (or whatever) exacts a cost that's hard to quantify. The fact is, he would say, you have no choice but to pay someone to do these things. In fact, he would add that for him, at least until he started having hip problems, paying someone to fix this or that thing around the house was a choice; for me and people like me, it's a necessity, because we have lost the knowledge required to do it.

For now, that doesn't matter. I am part of a highly complex economy and society where I make good money for my specialized knowledge and talents. Should we have some sort of general economic or social collapse, people won't need newspapers and magazines. They will need to know how to grow food, or kill and field-dress it. They will need to know how to fix their own cars, and things around the house. They will need to know a lot of things that men (and women) in general knew within living memory. The distance between me and my father is 32 years, a single generation. I shudder to think about how much was lost, and how this is entirely my own fault. I didn't want to live in a world in which I needed to know those things.

True story: I remember feeling so proud when, at age 23, I told my father how friends didn't show up to meet me while backpacking around Europe, so I found myself a room in Paris and entertained myself for a few days. He was awestruck that I could pull this off; I was startled that something that came so naturally to me stymied him. Finally, something I can do that my omnicompetent country dad can't! Well, now I'm almost 40, and it occurs to me that one can get along fine without knowing how to manage alone in a foreign country. But one can only get along fine without the practical knowledge my dad has if everything goes right, forever.

Our Benedictine future

I got in not long ago from a dinner for the 10th anniversary of Spence Publishing here in Dallas. They had a panel of Spence authors who took questions from the audience. Among the panelists were Phyllis Schlafly, J. Budziszewski, Russell Hittinger and Thomas Hibbs. I asked a question. I brought up MacIntyre's line about how the world today awaits a new St. Benedict, and asked the panel to speculate on what St. Benedict would tell us if he showed up in contemporary America, about how we can best resist the disorders of the age.

Russ Hittinger, the Catholic scholar, jumped all over the matter of stability. Russ said that perhaps greatest of all the Benedictine insights was the value of stability (in the Rule of St. Benedict, all Benedictine monks are required to vow to remain in their particular monastery all their lives). Russ said that people gathered around Benedictine monasteries because they knew the Benedictines would always be there. If the barbarians came and killed all the monks, the Benedictines would send more. People could count on that. And he said it took a very long time to teach people the basic skills of civilization.

"It's an odd thing about how long it takes for anything good to happen," he said. "You have to be patient. The Benedictines were patient. People lost everything in the collapse of the Roman Empire. Do you know that they didn't even know how to make roofs for hundreds of years? Rome was such a complex and advanced economy that when the thing fell apart, people had gotten so specialized that they couldn't do anything. The Benedictines taught them everything. And the Benedictines taught the men how to be fathers. They civilized people. But they couldn't have done any of it if not for the vow of stability."

He added that in Europe today, the major cities are all places that had begun as either Roman garrisons, or Benedictine monasteries. "Armies leave," Russ said. "But the Benedictines stayed."

He said too that it's interesting to note how long it takes, and how much patience it requires, to do something good that's lasting. It took the Benedictines a long time to teach the people how to cultivate fields, for example. But they had all the time in the world. They weren't going anywhere. Think about how radical this would be in our society!

Phyllis Schlafly had earlier issued a familiar denunciation of feminists, the public schools and the judiciary. She had nothing to say for the Benedict question, but Tom Hibbs referenced her answer to a previous question, in which she said we have to raise our kids to engage the culture-war fights. Tom said that he recognizes that those "national fights" are important, but that we don't give enough attention to the quiet and sustained work of building up local institutions. And we should.

After the thing was over, people hung around for a while talking, and I spoke with a number of people from Baylor, the University of Dallas, and elsewhere. I mentioned to a Baylor professor, an Evangelical, what a Reformed professor friend had told me earlier this week about his students: that almost all of them come from conservative Christian backgrounds, and vote Republican, yet when he looks at them he can see that their own spiritual and moral needs are so much greater than what our current political and social framework can provide. Replied the professor, "Yes! That is true! You see it at Baylor too!"

The evening ended in a hotel bar. I mentioned to another professor how interesting I found it that in most of the conversations I'd had with a wide variety of people in this conservative, religious audience, I got a clear sense that people are anxious about what's coming next, and fed up not only with the institutions on the Right, but with the lack of deep and creative thinking about culture and the crisis of the present moment going on anywhere. It would have been interesting to have asked the panel for their views on how and where contemporary con servatism has failed us. Anyway, I noticed too that whenever I'd mention to people my increasing conviction that if we tradition-minded folks are going to have a future worth having, it's going to have to be based in some way on what the Benedictine monks did -- whenever I'd say that to people, their eyes would light up. It seems to make intuitive sense to them. People are so hungry for depth, for permanence, for real holiness and transcendence and community. But of course nobody can say what concrete forms a neo-Benedictine revival would take.

Yet.

If you ever needed to remember which side you are on...

Leave it to the berserker left to remind you.

CC live!

If you're a CC blog reader in Dallas, and have nothing better to do on Saturday afternoon except be harangued by a shiftless scribe, stop by the Borders Bookstore on Lovers Lane at Greenville, and see Your Working Boy talk about "Crunchy Cons." The madness starts at 2 p.m. I'll be the one wearing the worn-out Birkenstocks. Come prepared to commit consumerism!

"True" conservatism

Andrew Sullivan says:

...the true conservative today is someone who defends the social architecture of liberal society, rather than pining for a past that never was in order to buttress prejudices that merely mask bigotry. That's the distinction between conservatism and reactionaryism.

I don't think Alasdair MacIntyre would dispute the substance of the point, but he would take it as an indication of how the conservative tradition has degenerated. MacIntyre remarked that "the contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals." By this he means that the idea that society is built around the autonomous, freely-choosing individual is now widely accepted.

Vatican and Maciel

Here's the Vatican statement on the Maciel case. Check out this intriguing tidbit from John Allen's story:

A senior Vatican official told NCR that the decisive break came only in late 2004, when a number of additional accusers came forward. Prior to that, he said, both John Paul and then-Cardinal Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI, were operating on the assumption that the charges were not justified.

The result is dissatisfying, though obviously the best one can hope for. It's fairly clear that Rome's investigators found merit to the accusations against him, but didn't want to put an elderly man through the rigors of a canonical trial. I would have thought this mercy would have been the best outcome...except that the Legionaries turn right around and seize on the lack of a trial and verdict as evidence that Maciel, like Jesus, has been crucified though innocent. No kidding, this is what they said:

2. Facing the accusations made against him, he declared his innocence and, following the example of Jesus Christ, decided not to defend himself in any way.

3. Considering his advanced age and his frail health, the Holy See has decided not to begin a canonical process but to "invite him to a reserved life of prayer and penance, renouncing to any public ministry".

4. Fr. Maciel, with the spirit of obedience to the Church that has always characterized him, he has accepted this communiqué with faith, complete serenity and tranquility of conscience, knowing that it is a new cross that God, the Father of Mercy, has allowed him to suffer and that will obtain many graces for the Legion of Christ and the Regnum Christi Movement.

5. The Legionaries of Christ and the members of the Regnum Christi, following the example of Fr. Maciel and united to him, accept and will accept always the directives of the Holy See with profound spirit of obedience and faith. We renew our commitment to work with great intensity to live our charism of charity and extend the Kingdom of Christ serving the Church.

Got that? Maciel is being persecuted, and the Legion refuses to accept that its founder might possibly be a man who compelled young seminarians to commit sexual acts upon him. A canonical trial would at least have given a more definitive answer -- not that it would have made any difference to the more hardcore members of the movement. But it least it would have given them less places to hide.

The National Catholic Reporter's editorial on this matter was a model of sober grace and charity, I thought.

The Gathering Storm

The Iranian parliament has reportedly voted to force Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians to wear colored badges on their clothing, so Muslims can identify them. Bernard Lewis is right: it is 1938 again. We need a Churchill, and everywhere we see cowardly, vacillating, dithering Chamberlains.

I wonder what Churchill would do about Iran? Given the mess the Bush administration has made of Iraq, I have grave doubts about an attack on Iran to keep it from gaining nuclear weapons. I have no doubt that we could destroy its nuclear infrastructure. But we should not doubt that an attack on Iran would unleash hell. I don't think the phrase is histrionic. Terrorist attacks on the West, bought and paid for by the Islamic Republic and its proxies, would become common. Indeed, the war would become a general clash of civilizations, and a long, bloody one. No sane person could want that.

And yet, I find it hard to dismiss the warning attributed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali: militant Islam is going to bring war to the West; the only question is will we fight an Iran armed with nuclear weaponry, or not? Something tells me that the 2008 presidential election will not be fought over budget deficits, entitlements, gay marriage or anything like that. Something tells me that for better or for worse, John McCain's moment is coming.

One thing America should do right this second: open its doors to all Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians who want to leave Iran. Bring them here now, before the Islamofascists build the Persian Auschwitz.

UPDATE: The Iran story has been called into question. Don't know it's current status, but wanted to note this for the record. But it's more solid that the Islamofascist regime in Tehran is going after the peaceful Baha'is. Again.

UPDATE.2: The story apparently isn't true ... but the Iranian government has other clothing legislation in mind.

Accountability

Julie Myers heads the U.S. Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She got into a situation the other night on Hugh Hewitt's radio program after the president's speech. Hugh pressed her on the administration's view on a border fence. She said at one point: "I don't think we think that fencing is the best way to stop them on the border. I think the President's called for...if you build a fence, they build a tunnel."

Today Julie Myers came by the Dallas Morning News to chat with the editorial board. Here's a partial transcript of the meeting. I'm the one asking the questions in boldface:

Kevin Stephens, a Border Patrol official, said in a recent interview that a security fence along the U.S.-Mexico border would act as a “force multiplier,” making it easier for the Border Patrol to do its job. Why does the administration oppose a physical, as distinct from virtual, fence along the border?

I am not the fencing expert. I do think the Border Patrol, those guys are down there and they have a much better understanding of what’s effective. My understanding is they think fencing works really well in some places, works not so well in other places. It depends on a number of things, so it’s important to have a layered strategy. But I would not pretend to be the final authority on fencing. Certainly we’ve seen it to be useful in some places. Some urban areas. In the rural areas, it’s not as effective, and some other things – surveillance or personnel – are more effective there.

You said on Hugh Hewitt’s radio program after the president’s speech that this administration is not in favor of physical fencing. Is that correct? What’s the policy?

In that very same answer, I said that fencing is part of the solution, it’s a layered approach. It’s my understanding that the administration believes that in some places we need to think about infrastructure fencing, in some places surveillance, in some places enhanced personnel. And so I think my comments there were completely mischaracterized and taken out of context, to be frank.

What is the case for no physical fence across the entire border? Why does the administration believe it wouldn’t be effective?

Once again, I am not the expert on fencing. My understanding is that the administration believes fencing is valuable in some places but not in every place. As we sit here today, I’ve not spent much of my time on where fencing is most effective, so regrettably, the Border Patrol is in a better position to answer those specific questions.

Is it just me, or do you agree that the head of the second-largest investigative agency in the US Government, the one responsible for arresting illegal immigrants, should be able to explain and defend a basic element of the administration's border enforcement policy. Right? Personally, I think it's indefensible, as does Hugh Hewitt, but shouldn't an administration official of that rank, and in that particular department, be able to talk knowledgeably about this matter?

Father Neuhaus on the immigration question

Richard John Neuhaus's judgment in the Maciel affair may have been unsound -- he claimed with "moral certainty" that the charges against Maciel were false and malicious; if the Vatican's statement tomorrow is as reported, he owes an apology to Jason Berry and Gerald Renner for attacking their character over the book they wrote about the Maciel affair -- but I think he nicely and calmly captures the way many of us feel about the immigration controversy. Here's an excerpt from his post:

To be sure, there are anti-immigrant xenophobes and bigots. And there are the people living in border states who justly complain about criminality and other burdens imposed by illegal immigration. Many other Americans, however, are humiliated and outraged that this great sovereign nation has not the will or the means to effectively control its own border. It strikes them as profoundly wrong that the law is flouted on a grand scale, and they are not impressed by reforms that do little more than fudge the flouting and advise everybody to get used to it.

[snip]

I don’t have an answer, never mind a comprehensive answer, to the question of immigration policy. It seems likely, however, that we are not going to have a calm and deliberate discussion of what the policy should be as long as 500,000 (some say 700,000) people are crossing the border illegally each year. Law and order does not guarantee justice, but it is certain there will be no justice without law and order.

Vatican: Maciel was (probably) a perv

The Vatican has ruled on the case involving Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, the founder of the Legion of Christ religious order, and the news is not good for Maciel and his supporters. The official Vatican statement will come tomorrow, but sources tell NCR that the elderly Maciel will have his ministry restricted -- something that is considered a sure sign that at least some of the sex abuse charges levelled against him by former seminarians were substantiated. Lee Podles says that this must be a sign that Pope Benedict believes that Maciel is guilty of at least some of it, else he wouldn't have undertaken such a move. I think that's probably right, and I also believe that this is a (welcome) fruit of the new pope's ministry -- this would never have happened under John Paul, who was, quite frankly, derelict in exercising discipline over high-ranking clerics in such serious matters.

This is not a day for rejoicing, because there are many, many good people affiliated with the LC who will be hurting. But it is nevertheless a day to give thanks -- I hope not prematurely -- for the fact that the justice Maciel's accusers sought (they never asked for money, and never went to civil court, only appealed to the Vatican) has finally been delivered. I will say, though, that I don't understand -- and perhaps the Vatican's statement tomorrow will make this clear -- why, if Maciel is believed guilty of the charges against him, the Vatican doesn't defrock him? What he is alleged to have done to seminarians under his command -- compelled them to engage in sexual relations with him -- is revolting.

Why polygamy is bad

The feddle gummint is on the hunt for wacko polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs. Here's a piece Naomi Schaefer Riley did for the Dallas Morning News last year on why the Jeffs sect compound is a clear and present danger to the social order. Writes Naomi: "[P]olygamy is not an activity whose effects are restricted to the bedroom and consenting adults. Rather, it seems to corrupt civil society as a whole, destroying education, individual rights and the rule of law – in other words, the foundations of democratic governance."

A.N. Wilson: DVC is an anti-Catholic smear

No kidding, A.N. Wilson, of all people, says so! Scroll down to read it. Excerpt:

The factual absurdities could all be dismissed by anyone with the smallest knowledge of history. What is harder to dismiss is the blatant anti-Catholicism, which is as crude as any Paisleyite sermon or No Popery pamphlet of the 19th century.

Roman Catholics, of whom I am not one, are surely entitled to wonder what would have happened to the Empire Cinema Leicester Square, where I saw this film, if the figures in the fantasy had been not Jesus and Mary Magdalene but the Prophet Mohammed and his family.

I think it would have been a case for the fire brigade.

A fair reading of history, first of Europe, then of the rest of the world, would speak of many wrongs done by the Roman Catholic Church, including persecutions and holy wars.

But it is also the Church that kept civilisation and learning alive in Europe. And in our own day, the work of Catholics in the poorest places of the world to relieve suffering and identify with the poor puts some other groups, including the vast bulk of stay-at-home secularists, to shame.

The Rumsfeld legacy

Read this e-mail exchange between a military columnist and Rumsfeld spokesman Larry Di Rita. This is one for the history books. Seriously.

Was it all a bad dream?

A new study indicates that the Roman Catholic Church is rebounding from the scandal. Catholics have not left the Church, stopped attending Mass, or stopped donating to their parishes. Satisfaction with church leadership "has now largely rebounded to prescandal levels," the New York Times reports.

You knew there had to be a rub. Here it is:

But the new study found that many Catholics knew little about the scope of the scandal, and that the percentage who said that they had heard about the bishops' responses to the scandal dropped to 40 percent in 2005 from a peak of 53 percent in 2004.

"They are just not very well informed of what is really happening," said John Moynihan, communications director for Voice of the Faithful, a Catholic reform group born in the scandal's wake.

Over and over since 2002, I have been amazed by how little most ordinary Catholics know about the corruption in the church related to child sex abuse and adult homosexual acting-out. This is because I live in the St. Blog's bubble, where we talk, or talked, about this stuff all the time. How could it be possible that Catholics don't know? But they don't -- nor, in my experience, do many of them care to be informed. Here in Dallas, for example, a group of parishioners at a large suburban parish finally succeeded last year in getting the bishop to yank their pastor from the ministry after he (the pastor) continued to employ as music minister a man who had been arrested for soliciting a vice cop for sex in a mall men's room. Much of the parish turned on their fellow parishioners for being mean to Father Bill. It's a very human thing: people don't want to know these things because to know is to have the responsibility for acting on that knowledge.

To be clear, whatever my own personal situation, I do not advocate leaving the Church or ceasing to attend mass over the scandal. But I do hope that Catholics realize that virtually the only effective way ordinary laymen have of affecting the conduct of the bishops and the clergy is with the power of the purse. If you fund priests and bishops who are doing bad things, you will get more of what you pay for.

Bottom line: this study shows that the scandal is "over," and that the bishops won.

UPDATE: A Catholic priest writes to say that in his view, the bishops have not won, that the Catholics who are really committed to the Church -- as distinct from people who identify as Catholics but who rarely show up to mass -- are not going to cut off their noses (by withholding donations) to spite the bishops. These people are resignedly waiting for the bishops who got us into this mess to retire.

"There is a cynicism and fatigue with the whole thing and with them that can't be missed. And no priest can miss the damage they did to our credibility," the priest writes. "It's really no victory if you know that you are regarded with weary distaste by your priests and people, that you're going to retire and be replaced, and that you're going to die and meet God having nothing to offer Him. But, in general, I think that what I am seeing is that there are a lot of people who decided that the bishops aren't the Church, and that the Church is important to them."

Out of touch, out of time

Harsh but prophetic words for President Bush and the GOP Congress from Peggy Noonan this morning:

The disinterest in the White House and among congressional Republicans in establishing authority on America's borders is so amazing--the people want it, the age of terror demands it--that great histories will be written about it. Thinking about this has left me contemplating a question that admittedly seems farfetched: Is it possible our flinty president is so committed to protecting the Republican Party from losing, forever, the Hispanic vote, that he's decided to take a blurred and unsatisfying stand on immigration, and sacrifice all personal popularity, in order to keep the party of the future electorally competitive with a growing ethnic group?
This would, I admit, be rather unlike an American political professional. And it speaks of a long-term thinking that has not been the hallmark of this administration. But at least it would render explicable the president's moves.

The other possibility is that the administration's slow and ambivalent action is the result of being lost in some geopolitical-globalist abstract-athon that has left them puffed with the rightness of their superior knowledge, sure in their membership in a higher brotherhood, and looking down on the low concerns of normal Americans living in America.

I continue to believe the administration's problem is not that the base lately doesn't like it, but that the White House has decided it actually doesn't like the base. That's a worse problem. It's hard to fire a base. Hard to get a new one.

Says it all

Christopher Lasch:

The hope of a new politics ... lies in rejecting conventional political categories and redefining the terms of political debate. The idea of a “left” has outlived its historical time and needs to be decently buried, along with the false conservatism that merely clothes an older liberal tradition in conservative rhetoric. The old labels have no meaning anymore. They can only confuse debate instead of clarifying it. They are products of an earlier era, the age of steam and steel, and are wholly inadequate to the age of electronics, totalitarianism, and mass culture. Let us say good-bye to these old friends, fondly but firmly, and look elsewhere for guidance and moral support.

Read the whole thing here. It comes from the 1980s, but boy, does it sound relevant today.

Conservative burnout on Bush

Andrew Sullivan speculates as to why conservatives are so dispirited, and have given up hope on Bush. For me, the precise moment was "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." The Harriet Miers debacle followed quickly thereafter, which made it impossible to deny any longer the left's charges that this president was more interested in loyalty and ideology than competence. And I finally got disgusted over how they managed the war. And then I finally had to admit to myself what a complete fiscal disaster this president (and the GOP Congress) has been. And now the immigration debate. I cannot imagine that six years into his presidency, that there's anything this president can do to win me back. Nor could I imagine what the Democrats could do to win me over. It's a bad place to be.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: "I will go on."

I am so glad this brave woman is coming to America! Here's her farewell speech to the lower house of the Dutch parliament. Excerpt:

I am therefore preparing to leave Holland. But the questions for our society remain. The future of Islam in our country; the subjugation of women in Islamic culture; the integration of the many Muslims in the West: it is self-deceit to imagine that these issues will disappear.


I will continue to ask uncomfortable questions, despite the obvious resistance that they elicit. I feel that I should help other people to live in freedom, as many people have helped me. I personally have gone through a long and sometimes painful process of personal growth in this country. It began with learning to tell the truth to myself, and then the truth about myself: I strive now to also tell the truth about society as I see it.


That transition from becoming a member of a clan to becoming a citizen in an open society is what public service has come to mean for me. Only clear thinking and strong action can lead to real change, and free many people within our society from the mental cage of submission. The idea that I can contribute to their freedom, whether in the Netherlands or in another country, gives me deep satisfaction.


Ladies and Gentlemen, as of today, I resign from Parliament. I regret that I will be leaving the Netherlands, the country which has given me so many opportunities and enriched my life, but I am glad that I will be able to continue my work. I will go on.

El chutzpah

The Mexican government says if any National Guard troops get involved in detaining its citizens who are in the United States illegally, it will file lawsuits in American courts. The nerve! They can't build the wall fast enough, if you ask me. I say build a no-nonsense border fence, then offer all illegals on this side of it amnesty ... and let's get firm control of our southern border. If the Mexican government, which is all too eager to help its lawbreaking citizens (see here and here), doesn't like it, tough. I'm not one of these "deport 'em all" conservatives, but good grief, the Mexican government is incredibly insulting and presumptious.

Da Vinci's a dog!

So say the Cannes critics. Permit me to get in touch with my inner Nelson Muntz and say "HA-ha!" Barbara Nicolosi is entitled to a paroxysm of Schadenfreude.

But you know, people will still go see this thing, and the core message will be a line that the Tom Hanks character says near the end: "What matters is what you believe." In other words, Truthiness uber alles!

Sounds like DVC will need all the help it can get. That's not what Ian McKellen is giving it by saying, as he did in the film's Cannes press conference, "Well, I've often thought the Bible should have a disclaimer in the front saying this is fiction. I mean, walking on water, it takes an act of faith."

That's a line as funny as it is foolish.

Fundamentalism in public schools

This is making the blogosphere rounds. It's a list of definitions of racism taken from the Seattle public schools website. Presumable it defines school policy. It's bizarre, and more than a little scary. For example, according to the Seattle Public Schools, only white people can be racist. Seriously, look it up. So what do they do when a black, Latino or Asian kid picks on a white kid using racial slurs? Or non-white kids use racial epithets against each other? According to the Seattle Public Schools, if you are white and you insist that you have rights, you are guilty of racism. Individualism and "having a future time orientation," whatever that is, are also signs of racism. And if you happen to be white and question these definitions, well, that just goes to show how racist you are.

Madness. And some people wonder why others have lost faith in public schooling.

Culture of Death files

There's an Internet game now that allows players to act out the roles of Columbine massacre villains Klebold and Harris. The Rocky Mountain News writes:

"We live in a culture of death," said Brian Rohrbough, whose son, Dan, was gunned down on a sidewalk outside the school, "so it doesn't surprise me that this stuff has become so commonplace. It disgusts me. You trivialize the actions of two murderers and the lives of the innocent."

Talk to me about how people like me who advocate a strategic withdrawal from the poisonous mainstream culture are wrong. I believe that people of faith have no choice now but to withdraw to defensible perimeters. And I believe the only thing that can combat the intense power of the Culture of Death is authentic religious faith. I am reminded of a famous anecdote about the great poet W.H. Auden, who was a typical secular liberal of his generation. In 1939, not long after the Second World War began, Auden went to a German-language film in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan, where he was living. The film depicted, from a Nazi point of view, German troops blitzkrieging their way across Poland. People in the audience were shouting, "Kill them! Kill them!" Auden left the theater shaken; he realized in that moment that all his sentimental liberalism about the essential goodness of mankind was a sham.

In the ensuing days, he would conclude that the only force strong enough to resist the intense and vital evil of Hitlerism was Christianity. Thus began his turning back to the faith of his youth.

In a similar vein, I don't know how anyone can mount a sustained and successful resistance to the Culture of Death outside of a profound and communal religious commitment.

A fitting epitaph for the GOP Congress

Dan Larison identifies an astonishing quote from GOP Rep. Mike Pence, from a recent National Journal story:

"We may be the party of Big Government, but they are the party of Really Big Government."

Pathetic doesn't even begin to describe this.

Randall Terry is now a Catholic

True!

By the beautiful sea

Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington will be moving on soon, and the Vatican has named Bishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh to replace him. Good, I guess. There was a time when I would have had a lot to say about this, but I can't muster up much interest. I wish the retiring cardinal many pleasant days of relaxing in prayerful solitude at his Jersey shore beachhouse.

Localism = Our Own McDonalds

Over at the Reactionary Radicals blog, John Zmirak makes an enthusiastic case for the value and diversity of localism in New York City, his hometown. John's bit made me think about my small hometown, and how growing up there in the 1970s and early 1980s, and having my worldview shaped by television, taught me to feel that there was something wrong with us. You're going to think this is stupid, and you're right, but what can I tell you, this is how it was. I remember many of us kids thinking that we were subpar because our town wasn't big enough to have a McDonalds. Mind you, we had a really great locally-owned hamburger joint when I was little, called the Redwood Inn. In fact, the only hamburger joint I bother to patronize today is Sonic, because their burgers taste exactly like the old Redwood Inn's (the Sonic No. 2, dear hearts, is my Proustian madeleine).

The point is, the lack of chain stores in our town made me sense that we hadn't arrived in the world, that I was living in a real backwater. And the more TV I watched, the more I absorbed its essential message: "You should be dissatisfied with everything in your life, because none of it quite measures up." Is this paranoid? Well, let me just say that I understood Terry Mattingly's point a few years ago when he told me how sad it was to him that his students in the Appalachian college where he taught had no interest in the actual living culture and heritage of the mountains -- especially the music -- but really just wanted a mall, and life to be like it was on television. I mean, I really got that, because that's how I grew up.

I saw Stephen Colbert interviewed on "60 Minutes" recently, and Morley Safer asked him how he could have grown up in Charleston and emerged with no Southern accent. Colbert, who is about my age, said that in his youth, Southern accents were television shorthand for "ignoramus, hick" -- so he decided he was going to lose his accent to be accepted by his betters. Happened to me too.

Now I wish I talked with the beautiful accent of my father, but to revert would be phony. Now I wish my hometown looked like it must have in my dad's youth, but ... you get the point. Have we gotten to the point where authentic localism means standing by your hometown McDonalds? And if so, how can we revert without being phony?

On the other hand

A new survey of "Da Vinci Code" readers in Britain finds that reading the book dramatically affects the core Christian beliefs of most. This is diametrically opposed to the Barna findings in the US. Leaving aside the methodology questions, how can we account for that? Could it be that Britain is already far, far gone into a post-Christian paganism, such that people are vastly more receptive to Dan Brown's message than Americans? That's my guess.

This is gonna be fun

Bill Kauffman and friends (including Caleb Stegall, late of NRO's Crunchy Con blog) have a lively new blog up in support of Bill's wonderful, crazy-a*s new book "Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists." The blog only lasts a month. I might be wrong here, but I think NRO started something when they launched a temporary blog for "Crunchy Cons." Now they've got one up for my friend John Podhoretz's provocative Hillary tome "Can She Be Stopped?" Good times for book people!

Christopher Lasch: Proto-Crunchy-Con?

Had a great conversation with Geneva College's Eric Miller this morning about, in part, the relevance of Christopher Lasch to crunchy conservatism and its future. In e-mail correspondence over the weekend, Eric directed me to this 1987 exchange between Lasch, who died in 1994, and a critic. Here's an excerpt to let you know why Lasch is so relevant:

Conservatives assume that deregulation and a return to the free market will solve everything, promoting a revival of the work ethic and a resurgence of ‘traditional values.’ Not only do they provide an inadequate explanation of the destruction of those values but they unwittingly side with the social forces that have contributed to their destruction, for example in their advocacy of unlimited growth. The poverty of contemporary conservatism reveals itself most fully in this championship of economic growth the underlying premise of the consumer culture the by products of which conservatives deplore. A vital conservatism would identify itself with the demand for limits not only on economic growth but on the conquest of space, the technological conquest of the environment, and the human ambition to acquire godlike powers over nature. A vital conservatism would see in the environmental movement the quintessential conservative cause, since environmentalism opposes reckless innovation and makes conservation the central order of business. Instead of taking environmentalism away from the left, however, conservatives condemn it as a counsel of doom. “Free enterprisers,” says Pines, “insist that the economy can indeed expand and as it does so, all society’s members can increase their wealth.” One of the cardinal tenets of liberalism, the limitlessness of economic growth, now undergirds the so-called conservatism that presents itself as a corrective and alternative to liberalism.

Not only do conservatives have no understanding of modern capitalism, they have a distorted understanding of the “traditional values” they claim to defend. The virtues they want to revive are the pioneer virtues: rugged individualism, boosterism, rapacity, a sentimental deference to women, and a willingness to resort to force. These values are “traditional” only in the sense that they are celebrated in the traditional myth of the Wild West and embodied in the Western hero, the prototypical American lurking in the background, often in the very foreground, of conservative ideology. In their implications and inner meaning, these individualist values are themselves profoundly anti-traditional. They are the values of the man on the make, in flight from his ancestors, from the family claim, from everything that ties him down and limits his freedom of movement. What is traditional about the rejection of tradition, continuity, and rootedness? A conservatism that sides with the forces of restless mobility is a false conservatism. So is the conservatism false that puts on a smiling face, denounces “doom sayers,” and refuses to worry about the future. Conservatism appeals to a pervasive and legitimate desire in contemporary society for order, continuity, responsibility, and discipline; but it contains nothing with which to satisfy these desires, It pays lip service to “traditional values,” but the policies with which it is associated promise more change more innovation more growth, more technology, more weapons, more addictive drugs. Instead of confronting the forces in modern life that make for disorder, it proposes merely to make Americans feel good about themselves. Ostensibly rigorous and realistic, contemporary conservatism is an ideology of denial. Its slogan is the slogan of Alfred E. Neuman: “What? Me worry?” Its symbol is a smile button: that empty round face devoid of features except for two tiny eyes, eyes too small to see anything clearly, and a big smile: the smile of someone who is dete rmined to keep smiling through thick and thin.

Of course, Lasch was hell on the Left too...

UPDATE: Caleb said it first!

DVC: Much read, but changes few minds

A new survey by the Barna Group finds that "The Da Vinci Code" has become the largest-selling spiritually-themed book in US history, not counting the Bible. Bad news right? Not necessarily. Barna's poll found that only five percent of those who read it said it changed the way they thought about religion.

More information from the poll. Turns out that the audience for the book is surprisingly Catholic, and surprisingly tilted toward upscale mainline Protestants:

The audience profile of the book is intriguing. Despite critical comments and warnings from the Catholic hierarchy, American Catholics are more likely than Protestants to have read it (24% versus 15%, respectively). Among Protestants, those associated with a mainline church are almost three times more likely than those associated with non-mainline Protestant congregations to have read the book. Upscale individuals – i.e., those with a college degree and whose household income exceeds $60,000 – are nearly four times more likely to have read the book than are “downscale” people (i.e., those without a college degree and whose household income is $30,000 or less).

(Hat tip: World blog)

Go, stay-at-home moms, go!

As part of a Mother's Day package that ran in yesterday's DMN, a colleague paid tribute to his working-mom wife, and I paid tribute to my stay-at-home-mom wife.

Elsewhere in free speech...

TMatt has a story of deadly violence inflicted on Pentecostal broadcasters in Kenya by unidentified gunmen angry over a program that featured a convert from Islam to Christianity who was on the air comparing the Bible to the Quran. The Kenyan government is defending the right of the Pentecostals to not be murdered for their religious beliefs, right? Wrong: the Kenyan government is, in the words of a government spokesman, "asking religious leaders not to say words or preach words that would breed intolerance."

In other words, blame the victim.

Welcome Ayaan Hirsi Ali! Free Paul Belien!

Great news -- the heroic Ayaan Hirsi Ali is moving to the United States to work for AEI. She is essentially being driven from her adopted country, the Netherlands, because of death threats from Islamic extremists. She's been living with this for some time now, but it does appear that there's a tide of growing resentment against her for having the nerve to make the Dutch uncomfortable about their all-too-tolerant attitude toward Islamofascism in their midst. Shame on Holland. It prefers peace to liberty, and shall in time have neither.

I certainly hope that some think tank will make room for the courageous Belgian writer Paul Belien, whose Brussels Journal has been a must-read for those on this side of the Atlantic who want to know about culture-clash news that doesn't make our newspapers. Belien writes today that he is in danger of having to shut down his blog because figures in the press and the establishment in Belgium are demanding that he be prosecuted for inciting race hatred. The mind reels. I've been a fairly regular reader of Brussels Journal, which takes a dim view of European multiculturalism and Islamic extremism, but has never, to my knowledge, published anything that could remotely be called incitement to race hatred. The material Belien and his writers publish would be quite mainstream in America. And now the weight of the Belgian state may be brought down to crush him and silence this independent outlet for criticism and commentary.

This is an outrage, and beyond chilling. As I understand it, Belien could go to jail for his words. What we're seeing here is the same thing as in Holland: cowed, simpering societies who are so unwilling to defend their own freedom in the face of radical Islamist assault that they punish the messengers -- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Paul Belien -- who are trying to warn them what's at stake. You don't have to agree with Hirsi Ali or Belien at all to be shocked by what's happening to them.

We have the First Amendment in the US, so thank God the fate of Paul Belien could never happen here. But I have had the experience of local Muslims who do not want critical attention paid to their radical associations and activities trying to use the "safety" issue to get me silenced. I've written in the Dallas Morning News before questioning the claims of a Muslim group to be dedicated to peace and reconciliation, when in fact its top leadership has a different record, and have been critical in print of certain things that the local Islamic leadership here has engaged in (e.g., holding a tribute to the Ayatollah Khomeini). I happened to sign on to a listserv for Muslims who don't like my newspaper's coverage. It took them a day to find out I was on -- I used my own name -- and kick me off, but in that time, I downloaded emails listing a proposal to run a stealth whispering campaign among local businesses and religious organizations to pressure my newspaper into firing or demoting me on the grounds that my commentaries pose a danger to Muslims. Of course I sent copies of all of this to company lawyers, because the language here was potentially actionable under libel law. Nothing ever came of this plan. Still, it was quite a lesson to me to see how these leaders were attempting not to meet my speech with speech of their own, but to use the so-called threat of physical danger to silence legitimate scrutiny and criticism of their policies and actions.

Question: if Paul Belien ran into a Catholic Church in Belgium seeking asylum from the Belgian legal system, would the Church give him the same sanctuary it's giving to illegal Muslim immigrants? I think we all know the answer to that question. As Belien writes today on Brussels Journal, "The lights are turning out for Europe. If America follows Europe’s example Christendom is lost."

Civitas? Communitas?

Of all the criticism I've gotten about "Crunchy Cons," the observation that I find the truest and most helpful is that the sensibility I write about in the book lacks a public dimension. A friend just sent me a copy of Eric Miller's generous and astute review of the book from "Books and Culture". It's not available online (alas!), but I want to quote the following from it at length:

Dreher's intent to erect a truer standard is refreshing. And it's refreshing because it's right. A profoundly sacramental vision must indeed lead us to straighten all aspects of our lives. Aart from a deeply rooted sacramental consciousness, humans live wtih a disposition not to receive grace but to dispose of its effects. Cultures that neglect to cultivate a sacramental experience of the world, in other words, default necessarily to an instrumental consciousness, with its narcissistic, self-deifying impulse toward consumption, whatever the cost.

But in the face of our persistent failures as a race to achieve this sublime vision of earthy, heavenly peace, how are we to live? this is where Dreher's political tradition fails him. For in this broken world, sacrament must always be complemented by that other deeply Christological, eminently political s-word: sacrifice, the laying down of one's life on behalf of the other. Crucially, outside his vision for the family, Dreher's political landscape is devoid of any such thing. ...[A]re there not other dimensions of our common life that citizenship -- whether Christian or American -- requires us to consider, especially in our age? In a book about fundamental moral and spiritual reorientation, does not the looming presence of injustice, inequity, poverty, and disease merit some attention?

America would be a better place if Dreher's crunchy conservatism won out, I'm sure. But not good enough, and maybe not even that good for very long, in our expiring times. For both "liberalism" and "conservatism" are traditions with a shelf-life. They are time-sensitive, and their time is out. It's not that nothing of worth remains within them -- quite the contrary, as Dreher's book attests. But the modern era that called these political traditions into being -- and that they, indeed, helped create -- has defeated them. At this late date, being "conservative" is an inadequate ideal for humans to aspire to -- as is being "liberal." What our moment requires instead is a politics more deeply human, more truly radical, something both old and new, a moral vision that might teach us anew what any healthy family, church, neighborhood, or nation already knows: how to conserve and liberate at once.

Professor Miller, a historian at Geneva College, goes on to suggest that it's time for a revival of populism, and suggests rediscovering Wendell Berry and Christopher Lasch. In one of those wonderful coincidences, it so happens that I've been reading Christopher Lasch in the past month or two -- and was sitting out back this morning reading "The Revolt of the Elites" -- and the same package from my friend that came this afternoon containing Miller's review also contained a CD of the November/December 2005 Mars Hill audio featuring an interview with ... Eric Miller, talking about the "revolutionary traditionalism" of Christopher Lasch. (You can't hear the interview for free, but there is a "bonus track" of the interview available here).

Anyway, one thing from "The Revolt of the Elites" that I marked down to blog on today was Lasch's condemnation in that 1995 book of the middle-class American practice of gated communities, fenced playgrounds, and the kinds of things that separate children from actual street life. Lasch quotes Jane Jacobs talking about how this sort of thing demonstrates contempt for ordinary people. Ye t Lasch is adamant about the need for high standards of behavior held in common as a requirement for a civil life together. This is something that struck me this morning reading Lasch's book. There is so much disorder in American life today -- much more than the early 1960s, when Jacobs made her observation. Small example: a few months ago, a young man pulls up in front of our neighbor's house and waits in the car for his girlfriend or wife to come out of the house. He starts blasting loud, incredibly vulgar hip-hop music. It was like listening to an audio version of Hustler magazine. Another neighbor and I went over to him and asked him to turn it off, that there were kids around. He sneered, but cut off the radio without protest. I noticed that he had a two year old child in the car with him.

I thought about that little exchange all day long. When I was growing up, there was no such thing as that kind of utterly violent and degrading music, and if there were, it would have occurred to exactly no one that it was acceptable to play it so loud, and in a residential neighborhood on a Saturday morning with kids out helping to put up Christmas decorations. My friend N. told me a couple of weeks ago that she learned the hard way that she couldn't trust a friend from church (!)with her children. (N.'s friend had taken N.'s 13 year old daughter and her own child to see a movie that was highly inappropriate for kids that age; N.'s friend was so permissive that the evening ended at a private party with the police called.) N. told me she just assumed a basic sense of right and wrong, to say nothing of common sense, would obtain with her friends, but she keeps having to learn that it ain't necessarily so. "My husband and I are getting a reputation among other parents as being the 'mean Mom and Dad,'" she said. "But you wouldn't believe what these parents let their kids do."

The point is, I want to believe in the possibility for reviving a common culture, but I find it difficult to take that leap of faith. And yet, I have heard from several crunchy-con types who talk about how they're engaged in just that work of cultural rebuilding in their own towns. As much as I dislike in theory this secessionist model and what it says about democracy, I understand why good people do it in good faith: the collapse of standards has made it very difficult to envision a common culture. Thoughts?

Exterminating the poor

Ramesh Ponnuru cites a rather jaw-dropping letter from pro-choice lawyer Ron Weddington to President Clinton, urging him to do everything to make the abortion pill legal and widespread in this country. Why? For the sake of, um, social reform. Here's an excerpt from the letter:

[Y]ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I'm not advocating some sort of mass extinction (sic) of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can't afford to have babies. There, I've said it. It's what we all know is true. . . .

I am not proposing that you send federal agents armed with Depo-Provera dart guns to the ghetto. You should use persuasion rather than coercion. . . . You made a good start when you appointed Dr. Elders, but she will need a lot of help. . . .

[G]overnment is also going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions. . . . There have been about 30 million abortions in this country since Roe v. Wade. Think of all the poverty, crime and misery. . . and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don't have a lot of time left.

We don't need more cannon fodder. We don't need more parishioners. We don't need more cheap labor. We don't need more poor babies.

The most chilling line in this passage: It's what we all know is true. No doubt he speaks for many elites in the Democratic Party -- and frankly, he speaks for many Rockefeller-Republican elites in the Republican Party (the type of wealthy do-gooder that did lots of work with Planned Parenthood) before the grubby Catholics and Evangelicals became such a big part of the base. Democrats, when will you as a party fight those within who see poor babies as life unworthy of life? I'm fairly confident that quite a few Democrats find this letter revolting, but are these the Democrats who have influence in their party?

Don't come back with, "Well, the Republicans won't support these babies after they're born." That's a separate issue, and of an entirely different level of moral seriousness. There is no moral equivalence, not even remotely. You can't get much poorer than dead. The icy elitist contempt in Weddington's missive for soldiers, churchgoers, manual laborers and the poor explains, in my view, why so many military people, religious folks, and members of the working class vote Republican. Again, I say this as someone who very much wants the Democrats to change so voters like me will feel as if we have a real choice. Though I may disagree with this or that GOP policy, and might trust the Democrats to do a better job on this or that issue, in the end, I cannot shake my well-grounded fear that voting in a Democratic government means that more or less the Ron Weddington view of the sacredness of human life will be in power.

Bank of America nixes Boy Scouts

Red State reports that in Georgia, a Bank of America declined to give its annual donation to the Boy Scouts this year because of the Scouts' position on homosexuality. We move closer and closer to the society Maggie Gallagher wrote about, in which homosexuality is seen as the equivalent of race (that is, something that has no moral component), and discrimination against homosexuals will be stigmatized and punished like the discrimination on the basis of race. And big business is leading the way.

Martyrdom and DVC

Diogenes makes a Kierkegaardian point about Truth, in the face of popular gnosticism. Excerpt:

So what can an ordinary Christian point to in refutation of those glib, professorial, subversive neo-Gnostics who contend that The Da Vinci Code somehow overthrows the orthodox faith?

It's simple: martyrdom.

From the very beginnings of the Church the faithful were tortured and put to death because they believed the Gospel was true and because they refused to deny this truth, and the same witness has been given throughout the history of the Church up to and including the present day. Gnosticism, by contrast, never produced martyrs, and was somewhat embarrassed by its collaborationist tendency already in the time of Valerian. Today's Gnostics are no different. When someone assures you he thinks the The Da Vinci Code tells the real story of Jesus, ask him: "Would you go to your death for the belief that Dan Brown has it right?" If he says no, the conclusion is obvious: "Ah, I see. You weren't talking about truth. You meant to say that life would easier for you if the Catholic Church were wrong."

The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church -- and a sign that she is what she says she is. No man ever offered his life in witness to a chess set; no academic will stake a missed lunch on the truth of the Gospel of Judas.

Designer babies

A woman in England is pregnant with the first baby genetically modified to prevent the child from inheriting its mother's propensity to a kind of eye cancer. Well, why not? The child is being spared suffering -- though the embryos this woman and her partner created by IVF were discarded (too bad for them). So what happens when a couple wants to have a child that doesn't carry a gene making them more likely to be obese? The obese suffer health problems and discrimination in society -- is it so wrong to protect a child from that? And if it's okay to create designer babies for the sake of sparing them physical suffering, on what solid moral grounds does one deny a prospective mother the opportunity to have a baby that genetically suits her purely aesthetic desires?

You see where this logic goes. These procedures aren't cheap, surely, so what happens when the wealthy have the means to create designer offspring that are smarter, thinner, stronger and healthier than everybody else? What will happen to those who are less smart, less thin, weaker and sicker? Will we come to resent them as morally unfit?

If life is not valued in and of itself, and not just for instrumental means (i.e., its perceived utility), we are on a slippery slope to eugenics ... and you know where that ends up.

Family and modernity

I've been poking through some old books this morning as I'm putting together the new chapter for the paperback edition of "Crunchy Cons." Here's an interesting thought from Christopher Lasch, from "The Revolt of the Elites":

The more closely capitalism came to be identified with immediate gratification and planned obsolescence, the more relentlessly it wore away the moral foundation of family life.

In other words, our consumer economy and consumerist social ethic makes it harder to maintain traditional family life. In fact, Lasch observes that in modern liberal democratic society, the market is the main institution, and "inexorably it remodels every institution in its own image." Even the family.

Think of this alongside the following paragraph from Philip Longman's "The Empty Cradle," a progressive argument for having bigger families (Longman's basic argument is that falling birthrates mean that only those "fundamentalists" who reject modernity and who have big families will inherit the earth):

The Victorians had understood that the emergence of industrialized capitalism made the family all the more essential, both as a "haven from a heartless world," and as a fount of what we today call human capital. But Victorians were not able to figure out, nor has anyone since, how to preserve the family so long as either market forces or the state usurps its productive functions.

If "happiness" is thought of as a right, and happiness is thought inseparable from material gain and upward mobility, then it is hard to see how "extra" children fit into this vision of the good life. That's why Longman believes religious conservatives who see children as being a positive good, even if it decreases the likelihood of material gain and social advancement, as being uniquely prepared to thrive in the coming decades.

Conservative P.C.

Reason's Jesse Walker is a libertarian who says that too many conservatives have become politically correct whiners. His piece got me to thinking about ways that my side is guilty of political correctness. P.C. is all about an inability to think outside rigid orthodoxies, or to tolerate the same. Maybe you can think of a few ways people like us are guilty of this too.

First thing that came to my mind was the inability of orthodox Catholics to discuss difficulties following the Church's teaching on contraception. Among many Catholics who hew (like me) to the Vatican line, there seems to be a deep and fearful reticence to talk about how hard it is to do. Being difficult is no reason not to obey the teaching, of course, but I've detected over the years a rigidity on the subject -- as if to admit that y'know, this stuff can be complicated, is to open a Pandora's box that leads straight to You Know What. For some reason, contraception is the absolute hard-and-fast line many orthodox Catholics draw, in the same way it is taboo in many secular liberal circles to question abortion. When I recently admitted on this blog that I was considering conversion to Orthodoxy, more than one Catholic wrote to me suggesting that the only reason I was interested in Orthodoxy was so I could start contracepting. Which is ludicrous and insulting, but it does show you how fearful and p.c. a lot of orthodox Catholics are about the topic.

I've also noticed in all the public discussion of "Crunchy Cons" that it is very hard on the Right to admit to any questions or doubts about the superiority of free-market economics. Re-reading my own book, I detect a clear sense of punch-pulling out of fear that to speculate about the deleterious effects on society of free-market economics is to out oneself as a crypto-leftie. My book was unfortunately timid in parts because I was (unconsciously) censoring myself, fearing backlash.

How about it? Anybody got any instances of PC on the Right, religious and otherwise, you care to add to my short list and Jesse Walker's?

Abe Rosenthal: Friend of the Persecuted

Back in the mid-1990s, I was so moved by New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal's passionate advocacy for Sudanese Christians persecuted by the Islamist government in Khartoum that I actually wrote him a letter thanking him. Terry Mattingly reflects on that aspect of the man's legacy (Rosenthal died this week). Here's TMatt:

I talked to Rosenthal several times about this, in part because a human-rights activist sent him a copy of that 1996 column that I wrote about slavery and the South Sudan. Rosenthal said that he showed it to several people in the newsroom and asked them why this issue — the persecution of religious minorities — wasn’t a major news story. No one had a good answer. Thus, he pledged that he would write about South Sudan.

Rosenthal decided that, one way or another, political prejudices must have had something to do with this blind spot. Here is what he told me in a 1997 interview, a year in which he wrote nearly two dozen columns about Sudan and the persecution of Christians, moderate Muslims and other religious minorities in human-rights hot spots around the world.

“You don’t need to be a rabbi or a minister to get this story. You just need to be a journalist. You just have to be able to look at the numbers of people involved and then look at all the other stories that were linked to it,” he said. “So why are journalists missing this? . . . I am inclined to believe that they just can’t grasp the concept of a movement that includes conservatives, middle-of-the-road people and even some liberals. Their distrust of religious people — especially conservatives — is simply too strong for them to see what is happening.”

To paraphrase, Rosenthal had been forced by the facts to grasp this fact — many journalists in the mainstream press just don’t get religion.

What he could not understand, he told me, was that many journalists didn’t seem to want to open their eyes and realize that this was hurting them as journalists. Because of this blindness, many newsrooms were missing stories that did not need to be missed. They were losing readers that they did not need to lose. It just didn’t make sense to him.

Now Rosenthal is gone. But his voice is heard, whenever people gather to protest the genocide in Darfur. I hope that his death causes some journalists to dig out some of his columns and catch up with the big story that Rosenthal, as an angry old journalist who cared about human rights, was writing about long before it was acceptable to write about it.

Will your 12 kids be Catholic?

From one of the contraception comboxes below, a reader responding to the point that those who don't believe in contraception will inherit the world (because the contraceptors aren't having enough children to compete), a reader commented:

What makes you think that your 12 babies are going to grow up to be conservative Catholics? If anything, our nation's history suggests the opposite (see 1960s).

Philip Longman answers that in his long patriarchy essay:

One could argue that history, and particularly Western history, is full of revolts of children against parents. Couldn’t tomorrow’s Europeans, even if they are disproportionately raised in patriarchal, religiously minded households, turn out to be another generation of ’68?

The key difference is that during the post-World War II era, nearly all segments of modern societies married and had children. Some had more than others, but the disparity in family size between the religious and the secular was not so large, and childlessness was rare. Today, by contrast, childlessness is common, and even couples who have children typically have just one. Tomorrow’s children, therefore, unlike members of the postwar baby boom generation, will be for the most part descendants of a comparatively narrow and culturally conservative segment of society. To be sure, some members of the rising generation may reject their parents’ values, as always happens. But when they look around for fellow secularists and counterculturalists with whom to make common cause, they will find that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never born.

Thomas More and William Roper

We just had an editorial board discussion about what to say concerning the latest NSA revelations. I was probably the most critical board member of the president. I flat-out don't believe him when he says that the NSA is operating within the bounds of the law. This president has made it crystal-clear that his understand of legality within the context of fighting the anti-terror war is very, very expansive. Congress bans torture, but the president says he has the right to torture if national security demands it. I think it is entirely possible that the NSA is behaving legally in this latest controversial matter. But I don't trust Bush. I believe that he sincerely believes that the ends of protecting the American people justifies any means he thinks necessary. Which is why I vigorously argued for active Congressional oversight.

I didn't prevail in this meeting. A colleague who was just as vigorously on the other side of the issue asked me afterwards to explain myself. "You're the only member of the editorial board to have seen the Twin Towers fall, and to have seen the rubble with your own eyes," he said, adding that he didn't understand why, with my first-hand experience of the damage that Islamic terrorists can do, I have such reservations about the NSA. I told him that I cannot forget how my intense emotions -- the fear and loathing I felt for Islamic terrorists and their supporters -- allowed me to believe anything the government told me that would justify hitting them as hard as they hit us. I completely suspended my critical faculties in the march-up to the war, because I wanted to believe that the measures the Bush administration was proposing were just and right, and that the government could be trusted in this matter.

We know how that all turned out.

But there's more. I have very little faith in human nature. A government that acquires ever more information about the private lives of its citizens, all in the name of fighting the Devil of terrorism, will at some point be tempted to make use of that power for evil means -- and by then, who will be able to stop them, if on the road to this tyranny, we disregarded laws in an effort to spare nothing in the pursuit of terrorists? Many people have seen either the play or the film version of "A Man For All Seasons" There is a memorable exchange between Sir Thomas More and William Roper, who wants Sir Thomas to bend the law for the sake of pursuing bad guys more efficiently. Sir Thomas refuses on principle. There is this exchange:

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!

Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!

This is why I have a portrait of St. Thomas More on my desk. I'm looking at him as I write this. Human nature has not changed. Nor has the nature of government, and the temptations of power.

Tom Hibbs on "Crunchy Cons"

Here's Tom Hibbs's review of "Crunchy Cons" in Crisis. Excerpt:

Dreher’s book details a kind of awakening of many Americans from a certain naïveté about the market and popular culture. There is a disconnection, or perhaps a hidden connection, between the material prosperity of our culture and our inarticulacy about what matters. Perhaps there was a time when that inarticulacy did not matter as much; now, it does. Dreher mentions the regular occurrence of well-intentioned parents who hand their kids over to public or private schools and to our popular culture and then end up shocked at the results. The objection is not to the market in all forms, only to the market as infiltrating all spheres of human life, particularly marriage, the family, and the rearing of children. Crunchy Cons is full of stories of active resistance to the culture and the market: parents who throw out their TVs and decide to homeschool their kids, join a food co-op, or take up farming. The task, as Dreher describes it, is to “imagine life outside the boundaries set by our media culture.”

Contraception and Christianists

You really can't hope to do better than the smackdown Christianity Today's Ted Olsen did to Russell Shorto's NYT Magazine scare piece about the attack on contraception. The heart of what's wrong with the Shorto piece, aside from the fact that it seems ginned up to frighten Blue Staters about the Christianist theocratic hordes on the horizon, is this, says Olsen: The debate over contraception isn't about "whether it's okay to have sex" but rather about what sex is.

Absolutely! Shorto's piece quotes Al Mohler, the leading Southern Baptist theologian, writing, "The effective separation of sex from procreation may be one of the most important defining marks of our age — and one of the most ominous. This awareness is spreading among American evangelicals, and it threatens to set loose a firestorm.. . .A growing number of evangelicals are rethinking the issue of birth control — and facing the hard questions posed by reproductive technologies."

Shorto also quotes Pope Benedict XVI: "Contraception and abortion both have their roots in [a] depersonalized and utilitarian view of sexuality and procreation — which in turn is based on a truncated notion of man and his freedom."

This is actually a profound point, and the debate is not, as the Left would have it, about sex-hating right-wing Christians, but about a vision of what it means to be fully human. This liberal quoted in the Shorto piece seems to get it:

That may be a distinctly minority position, but some who work in the public health field acknowledge that the social conservatives have a point. "I think the left missed something in the last couple of decades," says Sarah Brown, president of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, which positions itself as a moderate voice in the heated world of reproductive politics. "With the advent of oral contraception, I think there was this great sense that we had a solution to the problem of unintended pregnancy. But that is a medical model. I think the thing that was missed was that sex and pregnancy and relationships aren't just a health issue. They are really about family and gender and religion and values. And what the right did was move in and say we're not just talking about body parts."

This is a discussion worth having. It is much more profound than falling back on the the sterile scare-rhetoric of the sexual revolutionists. The 21st century will be a century dominated by biotechnology, a century in which technological advancements will challenge what it means to be human to a degree previously unimaginable. If we assume, as the sex rev advocates do, that any technology that advances sexual liberty and pleasure is either morally neutral or morally good, because exercising moral autonomy is what it means to be human -- well, then we've opened the door for all kinds of anti-human technologies.

But if you believe otherwise, well, hang tight, because by the end of the century, there are going to be a lot more of you (of us) around.

Ahmadinejad's letter

One of my personal hobbyhorses is how so many of us in the establishment media simply don't get religion (and here is the place to plug the entire blog dedicated to tracking this phenomenon!). Whenever Hamas is discussed, media folks tend to think of them in purely secular terms, as a political movement like any other. The truth is that they are primarily a religious movement, and an absolutist one at that, which means that they have far less wiggle room for compromise or backtracking than others. I've read that the reason the CIA was able to penetrate the Soviet system so well is that the higher up you got in the party, the more you were able to see what a sham the whole thing was, and the more corruptible you then became. But the reason the CIA has not been able to penetrate al-Qaeda is because the higher up you go, the more religious you are, and therefore the less corruptible.

The point is, it's not true that everybody has his price. Authentically religious people might be crazy or evil, but they should be taken at their word. It should not be assumed that they can be bought off, or persuaded to compromise. How do you compromise with the Absolute?

This is why I think it's stupid to laugh off the Iranian president's letter as the work of a kook. Amir Taheri says it far better than I can. Ahmadinejad might be a fool, but there is method to his madness. He really does seem to believe that the end of the world is at hand, and that he has a divinely mandated role in bringing it about via a clash of civilizations. The letter is obviously meant for domestic and Third World consumption; it is rich indeed to read the president of a country that's spending a great deal of money to develop nuclear weaponry and to fund terrorism in the Middle East lecture President Bush on how much better off the world would be if America spent money it lays out for the military on feeding the poor and spreading peace instead.

It was interesting, though, to read Ahmadinejad's claim that the world is turning away from liberal democracy and free markets as having failed to help realize human ideals. Oh? I am not one of those who believe that liberal democracy is the be-all and end-all of human existence. But honestly, if Islamic theocracy is so much better, how come Westerners aren't clamoring for visas to take up residence in Iran? Liberal democracy will always need improvement, but it is truer to any human ideals that I'd want to be associated with than Islamic theocracy, which stands for a jackboot in the face forever.

"Hijacking" faith/Christianists

Yesterday a colleague floated the idea that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had "hijacked" Islam. I responded, "How would we know?" My point was that none of us in this department know enough about what constitutes normative Islam to be in a position of accusing the Iranian president of kidnapping and commandeering the Islamic faith. The notion that he or any other unpleasant Islamic leader has "hijacked" Islam is based on the assumption that normative Islam is something that we Westerners would find congenial. I'm reminded of something a Muslim told me at a conference in Dubai last December. He said that these conferences are of limited value because only the "nice" Muslims get invited. "The Islamists are never asked to these events," he said. "But you can't understand the Arab world as it really is unless you talk to the Islamists." He added that we Western media only want to hear from Arab Muslims who say things we like -- and we consider them to be the "real" Muslims, because we need them to be the "real" Muslims.

It was an astute comment, and one that goes a long way to explaining Andrew Sullivan's preoccupation with the "Christianists" who have in his view "hijacked" Christianity, and suppressed the supposed Christian mainstream. A few weeks back, I blogged on how pathetic it was that Bob Edgar of the National Council of Churches claim that religious liberals have been "silenced" for the last 40 years by religious conservatives, when in fact they themselves bear the most blame for their own irrelevance. Similarly, it's just bizarre for Andrew to claim or insinuate that it's somehow extremist for Christians to believe that homosexual acts are sinful, or (more broadly) that Christians should put their faith into action in the political sphere.

On the former point, I suppose you might argue that Christianity is wrong to take the stand it does on homosexuality, but you certainly cannot claim that it is extreme, either in the Christian past or today. On the second point, while I agree that it is not healthy for the church to get too tightly bound to any particular political party, it is an extreme position in the broad sweep of American history to say that Christians (or any religious believers) should not work to see what they believe in brought to bear on law and public policy. There are important limits on this sort of thing in a pluralist society, of course, but one gets the impression that in Andrew's world, conservative Christians should just keep their faith to themselves, as if it were a personal hobby. Where on earth would the abolitionists have been if they believed that ("I'm personally opposed to slavery, but I wouldn't dare think to interfere with your choice to hold them.")? Where would Martin Luther King have gotten if he'd not believed with all his heart that segregation was a stench in the nostrils of the Almighty?

You see where I'm going with this. What Andrew objects to is not Christian involvement in political life, but the involvement of Christians of which he disapproves. It reminds me of the kind of quietism advocated by Southern segregationist clerics of the civil rights era -- the kind who said that the busybody pastors, priests and rabbis who kept insisting that segregation laws were an offense to God were illegitimately crossing the bounds between the sacred and the secular. I am old enough to have actually heard this argument put forth by people who really did believe it. We'd all be a lot better off if polemicists like Andrew would argue over why conservative Christians involved in politics are wrong, instead of arguing that their involvement is illegitimate in the first place.

Get Sirius already

Got a press release last night about this story: the Catholic Archdiocese of New York is going to launch its own channel on Sirius satellite radio. One hopes for the best, but doesn't expect much of anything out of this venture. Why? Unless they really are going to break the mold, this radio station will be as bland and inoffensive as your standard diocesan newspaper, or your preach-by-numbers homily. Whatever else might be said about the independent Catholic media -- the National Catholic Reporter, the Wanderer, Catholic World Report, EWTN, et alia -- you cannot call them boring. They write about the Catholic world as it is, with a vision as to how it should be. During the Soviet era, the two big newspapers in the USSR were Pravda (meaning "truth") and Izvestia (meaning "news"). The joke was that there was no pravda in Izvestia, and no izvestia in Pravda. In my experience, there is far too little of either in diocesan media, just lots of proclaiming the Official Story.

Maybe this new Catholic radio channel will surprise. Still, it doesn't take a psychic friend to predict that we will never hear an open and frank discussion of the Catholic clerical sex abuse crisis (how could we when Cardinal Egan is so compromised by his role in it?), nor will we hear an open and frank discussion of the role of homosexuality in the priesthood. And that's just for starters. Also, I note in the Times account that a Sirius executive seems to be mistakenly looking at the Catholic radio audience as a monolith, as if all Catholics were potential customers. I hope he is aware of how balkanized American Catholics are. NCR readers wouldn't pick up the Wanderer, and vice versa -- and devotees of either paper wouldn't waste their time on their diocesan rag, most likely. Orthodox Catholics who want to get serious devotional and catechetical programming on satellite radio are likely to listen to EWTN, which has its own Sirius channel.

Anyway, this new Catholic channel has a real challenge ahead of it. It needs to be bold, but the moment it tries to be, the institutional church is going to intervene, and that will be that. What we really need is for Catholic World Report, with its combination of fidelity to Catholic teaching, lively writing and critical, even fearless, editorial independence, to launch its own satellite radio channel.

Clark Kent Ervin

Just spent an hour interviewing Clark Kent Ervin, former top Homeland Security staffer whose new book, "Open Target," details his deeply troubling experiences with DHS. Ervin's a Republican and a longtime Bush friend, and he comes across as a straight shooter. The story he has to tell is an outrageous one. His bottom line is that the country is still quite vulnerable to terrorist attack, in large part because of cronyism and a dysfunctional bureaucracy, and a "what, me worry?" attitude. He said his great fear is that it's going to take another 9/11 to make the American people and our leaders in Washington wake up to how serious the problems are.

I tell you, you can't listen to this guy or read his book without getting furious at Washington and the hapless Republican leadership. I read this stuff and keep thinking, for this I voted Republican?

Women: Now just as loutish as men

Last night I caught part of a program on PBS about speed dating. It was a BBC show, and what shocked me was how sleazy the women were. I can't see that it's much of an advance for humanity if women are as gutter-minded and lewd as men tend to be. I suppose I'm dating myself, but I'm old enough to remember when men, even teenage boys, would mind their manners in the presence of females, on the theory that respect for them as women demanded it. Now I see that Anthony Esolen makes a similar point at Mere Comments, saying that those days have left us, that some teenage girls -- and teenagers in general -- have lost all sense of what is appropriate to discuss, or even do.

This is the kind of thing that goes through my mind when I think about schooling my kids. Critics of homeschooling say, "Your kid won't be socialized!" I say, "Socialized into what? That? Please."

All the rules and regulations in the world cannot make up for what is lost when men and women lose the internal sense of decency, order and self-discipline that keeps the public square from being so coarse. It was helpful to fathers and mothers trying to civilize their sons by curbing their brutish impulses to be able to hold the idea of treating women with respect (and thereby winning the respect and possibly the attention of those females) as a carrot. This is just one more example of why more and more of us -- and not just conservatives -- have less and less in common with the common culture. And want to secede.

The Protestant Deformation

Ross Douthat has picked up on the CC post the other day on whether or not Evangelicalism is a good fit for conservatism (this, based on a Wilfred McClay speech). He says that the Bush Administration's failures are not only due to the intersection of big government and crony capitalism, but also:

They have also been evangelical failures, flowing from a surfeit what McClay calls the "moral radicalism" of the evangelical mind, which is a bit too eager to unleash that "fire in the minds of men" that Bush cited in his Second Inaugural Address. Unlike Andrew, I don't think this fire is burning out of control among "Christianists" or theocons or whatever - or if it is, it's hardly the existential threat that he makes it out to be. I do think, though, that the Iraq War will stand for a long time as a monument to the potential excesses of evangelical thinking - and when it comes to our foreign policy, I hope the next GOP President partakes of a little less of Bush-style missionary zeal, and a little more of that old-time conservative religion.

All this calls to mind a fascinating essay that Swarthmore's James Kurth, a conservative and a Presbyterian, wrote for The American Interest not long ago. It's called "The Protestant Deformation," and in it, he talks about how America's crusading internationalism is a direct result of the decline of the Protestant Reformation. I wish I could link to the entire essay, but it's behind the subscriber firewall. I can give you parts of it though. Here's his lede:

President Bush has often spoken of freedom as God's gift to America and to mankind, and of America's calling to bring freedom to all peoples. Moreover, his strongest electoral support has come from evangelical Protestants. These are the people the liberal media call "the religious right" (although by that logic, the media themselves should be called the "secular left").

As it happens, Protestantism has indeed had a major impact on U.S. foreign policy, but this is not primarily due to evangelical Protestantism. It is due to the "Protestant Deformation."

It is this peculiar pseudo religion upon which both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush have drawn in their foreign policies to spread American ideas of liberal democracy, free markets, individual freedom and human rights abroad.

Analysts have debated for decades the relative influence of different factors in the shaping of American foreign policy. Although numerous scholars have stressed the importance of realism, idealism, capitalism or liberalism, until recently almost no one has thought that Protestantism itself - the dominant religion in the United States - was worthy of consideration.

In fact, American foreign policy has been and continues to be shaped by the Protestant origins of the United States, but with a twist. That Protestantism has not been the original religion, but a series of successive departures from it down the scale of what might be called the "Protestant declension."

We are now at the endpoint of this declension, and the Protestantism that shapes American foreign policy today is a distinctive heresy of the original religion - not the Protestant Reformation, but the Protestant Deformation.

Kurth argues that the Reformation's rejection of hierarchy and community fostered an individualistic way of seeing the world that spread to secular life, including the world of politics and economics. Plus, the increasingly diverse nature of the American populace led to a kind of pluralistic civil religion, and mentality. He goes on:

The logic of religious pluralism, reinforced by the substantial numbers of Roman Catholics and Jews immigrating to the United States in the 1840s and thereafter, continued t o drive public officials even further toward the rhetoric of the lowest common and least offensive denominator.

This trend gave rise to a public vocabulary that used concepts congruent and congenial to Protestant ones but that made almost no references to religion at all. In regard to economic matters, the central concept was the free market; in regard to political matters, it was liberal democracy. By the early 19th century, most Americans had come to believe that the only legitimate form of economics was the free market, ordered by written contracts, and that the only legitimate form of politics was liberal democracy, ordered by a written constitution.

This was the mentality, really the ideology, described so brilliantly by that young Frenchman who was both an aristocrat and a liberal, Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1834).

Kurth goes on to say that Woodrow Wilson's crusading moralism and internationalism was the natural fruit of the Protestant Deformation. He says that it is perfectly obvious to millions of Americans that free markets and democracy are the right and proper way to organize societies everywhere -- and that (in Kurth's view) this view is what you should expect from a Protestantized culture. He predicts that the broader culture may well turn on Evangelicals and blame them for the Iraq debacle, which would be wrong because liberals too -- Progressives, you might say -- are formed by this Protestantized culture, and that there is a direct line between this deformation of Protestantism and liberalism.

It's a provocative thesis. Pity that his whole article isn't there to see. But you can get a better idea of what Kurth is talking about in this sidebar (posted to a blogsite), in which he identifies the stages in the decline of Reformational Protestantism to a secular creed that commits the cardinal conservative sin: an attempt to immanentize the eschaton!

Fonzie, you're doing a heck of a job

One thing that caused the Bush Administration to jump the shark with me was its rank cronyism. We saw the cost of putting political hacks in charge of important government business when it was revealed that the top leadership of FEMA were not disaster-response specialists, but appointees whose only relevant experience was their being politically connected to the White House. Here's a more recent example, one not nearly as calamitous, but obnoxious and indefensible. HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson gave a speech the other day in Dallas to a group of minority businessmen, and told them flat-out that he plays raw politics in the awarding of government contracts. Jackson told the story of a contractor who won a HUD contract on the basis of merit, but who then made the mistake of admitting to the Secretary that he didn't care for President Bush. Said Jackson:

"I said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'I don't like President Bush.' I thought to myself, 'Brother, you have a disconnect -- the president is elected, I was selected. You wouldn't be getting the contract unless I was sitting here. If you have a problem with the president, don't tell the secretary.'

"He didn't get the contract," Jackson continued. "Why should I reward someone who doesn't like the president, so they can use funds to try to campaign against the president? Logic says they don't get the contract. That's the way I believe."

I guess the only shocking thing about this was that Jackson was so bold about it. Fonzie, you're doing a heck of a job.

Good grief!

How bad has the military recruiting situation gotten? So bad that recruiters bullied an autistic young man who didn't even know there was a war going on into signing up.

Why I Can't Help Voting GOP.2

Another point, this one brief. A colleague of mine, a religiously observant Democrat, asked me recently why religious conservatives are so hung up on abortion, such that we are effectively single-issue voters (and we almost always go for Republicans). We made a plan to talk about it later, and when we do, I'm going to tell her that it goes beyond abortion itself, to a general attitude toward the sacredness of life. I firmly believe that we are going to see in this century a return to eugenics, and the commodification of human life in an extremely sophisticated way. At most risk will be the unborn, of course, who are society's weakest, but also those who are crippled, diseased, deformed, mentally retarded, or in some way imperfect by the standards of our coarsening society. There will increasingly be no place for them in this world we're building. They will be society's genetic losers. We will be ashamed of them, and women who choose to give birth to such children will be stigmatized (when we lived in NYC, Julie refused the amniocentesis test offered by her ob/gyn, telling the doctor that even if the baby were handicapped, we were going to accept him and love him; the doctor scowled and said nothing).

The Republicans are iffy on these issues. The Democrats are not. I believe the Democrats, as a general matter, cannot be trusted to be on the side of life. You go back and read what all the Progressives were saying about eugenics a century ago -- they were all for it. All the most liberal minds embraced it as the leading edge of progress. The only forces in the US who stood against it in any size were the Catholic and fundamentalist Protestant churches, who were roundly denounced as troglodytic. But they weren't: they were defending the sacredness of all life. The Nazis demonstrated the ultimate end to which eugenic doctrine would be put, and discredited it ... for a while. But it's coming back. I doubt Republicans can stop it, but I am convinced that the Democrats will welcome it as a further empowerment of the individual, and the individual's emancipation from the "tyranny" of nature.

Why I Can't Help Voting GOP

My book "Crunchy Cons" is filled with Sturm und Drang over the complicated and anxious relationship conservatives like me have with the Republican Party. But it takes something like Maggie Gallagher's must-read cover story in The Weekly Standard to remind me why, however great its sins and failings, the GOP is (for now) our political home.

In the piece, Gallagher reports from a Becket Fund for Religious Liberty conference iin which legal experts from both sides of the gay marriage debate met to talk about the road ahead. The consensus -- please note, the consensus, not merely the view of conservatives -- is summed up in this passage, in which Gallagher quotes Anthony Piccarello, the Becket Fund's president and general counsel:

Just how serious are the coming conflicts over religious liberty stemming from gay marriage?

"The impact will be severe and pervasive," Picarello says flatly. "This is going to affect every aspect of church-state relations." Recent years, he predicts, will be looked back on as a time of relative peace between church and state, one where people had the luxury of litigating cases about things like the Ten Commandments in courthouses. In times of relative peace, says Picarello, people don't even notice that "the church is surrounded on all sides by the state; that church and state butt up against each other. The boundaries are usually peaceful, so it's easy sometimes to forget they are there. But because marriage affects just about every area of the law, gay marriage is going to create a point of conflict at every point around the perimeter."

For scholars, these will be interesting times: Want to know exactly where the borders of church and state are located? "Wait a few years," Picarello laughs. The flood of litigation surrounding each point of contact will map out the territory. For religious liberty lawyers, there are boom times ahead. As one Becket Fund donor told Picarello ruefully, "At least you know you're not in the buggy whip business."

Here's one fascinating aspect of this report. Gallagher says she found those legal scholars opposed to gay marriage to be less worried about the future, because they find it difficult to imagine that the law will come to treat homosexuality like it does race. Those scholars who favor gay marriage rights are much more likely to expect major showdowns. Why? Gallagher thinks that it's because they move in circles where this civil rights equation has already been made. I can tell you from my little corner of the MSM that most people who work in the media live in that world too. You would have a hard time finding people to agree that the struggle for the right to gay marriage is any different from the struggle for black civil rights.

The real kicker is this: "Once sexual orientation is conceptualized as a protected status on a par with race, traditional religions that condemn homosexual conduct will face increasing legal pressures regardless of what courts and Congress do about marriage itself." Translation: churches, synagogues, mosques, religious schools and other institutions that uphold traditional moral teaching about homosexuality stand to lose their tax-exempt status.

I don't have a lot of faith that the Republicans will do much to defend religious liberty in this coming war. But I have complete faith that the Democrats will do their best to destroy it.

Barb unloads

Barbara Nicolosi can't figure out why many Christians are either enthusiastic for "The Da Vinci Code," or at least fail to see it as a threat. Excerpt:

We need to be very clear here: The Da Vinci Code is much, much worse than The Last Temptation of Christ in the errors that it contains. Last Temptation was wrangling with what being a God-Man really looked like. Da Vinci Code asserts that there was no God in Christianity's God-Man.

Having read the script, one of the things that I found particularly disgusting was the way in which screenwriter Akiva Goldsman (interpreting Dan Brown) continuously sets the Roman Catholic Church up against "true" Christianity. We are led to believe that Jesus wanted Christianity to be something else completely - a goddess cult - but that the "Roman" Catholic Church (why do so many non-Catholics always have to use that "Roman" word like it is some kind of disease?) co-opted the regular-Joe guy, Jesus, and corrupted his merely "happy thoughts" by making him God and creating a subversive political institution around him.

It is worth some serious discussion as to why the Catholic Church - among all Christendom - merits such hatred and persecution from the secular powers that be. Hmmmm... What do you all think?

But anyway, those Christians with anti-Catholic bigotry in their veins who are getting dark jollies out of watching the Catholic Church get trashed in DVC need to take a step back and stop scratching their painful, always inflamed rash - "Hurts so good!" - to feel the real pain of biting off noses to spite faces. As a Catholic friend remarked to me recently, completely dismayed by the warm embrace that DVC has found in some Christians, "They seem to hate the Catholic Church more than they hate blasphemy against Christ." Hard to hear? Definitely.

The Suicide of the West, Part CCCXVI

I have a great fondness for the Netherlands. I've been going there regularly for over half my life, visiting a number of dear friends I came to know through a high school pen pal. The Dutch people are hospitable, warm and a pleasure to be around. But I tell you, I stand wholeheartedly with Christopher Hitchens in his denunciation of the Dutch government and courts for the way they're treating Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch parliamentarian and Muslim apostate who now lives under constant police guard after her life was threatened for denouncing Islam. She is the canary in the coal mine of Dutch society, which seems ever more willing to act like kaas-etende capitulatie-apen. Her new book "The Caged Virgin" is now in bookstores. Here's Hitch on what's happened to her:

After being forced into hiding by fascist killers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali found that the Dutch government and people were slightly embarrassed to have such a prominent "Third World" spokeswoman in their midst. She was first kept as a virtual prisoner, which made it almost impossible for her to do her job as an elected representative. When she complained in the press, she was eventually found an apartment in a protected building. Then the other residents of the block filed suit and complained that her presence exposed them to risk. In spite of testimony from the Dutch police, who assured the court that the building was now one of the safest in all Holland, a court has upheld the demand from her neighbors and fellow citizens that she be evicted from her home. In these circumstances, she is considering resigning from parliament and perhaps leaving her adopted country altogether. This is not the only example that I know of a supposedly liberal society collaborating in its own destruction, but I hope at least that it will shame us all into making The Caged Virgin a best seller.

NoZe clarification

An update on the anti-Catholic incident at Baylor is on the Dallas Morning News blog.

Spengler on Truth, Beauty and Faith

The pseudonymous Asia Times Online columnist Spengler, who writes one of the smartest columns on geopolitics and culture anywhere, has joined the "Art and Faith" discussion thread below. An admirer of Benedict XVI, Spengler links to one of his own columns on the topic, a portion of which I excerpt here:

Power over nature is good, but it is not the good, for evil men can use this power for evil purposes; the case comes to mind of the physicist Werner Heisenberg attempting to build a nuclear weapon for Hitler. In some fashion music also involves a power over nature, or at least knowledge of nature's potential in the form of harmonies. I am not a scientist, but I am prepared to believe Einstein's claim that the beauty of nature reveals itself in harmony. In music, the capacity to move men by evoking their pre-conscious powers is good, but it is not the good.

Of all the Catholic writers, J R R Tolkien understood this point perhaps the best. His high-Elven master smith Feanor created the Silmarils, three jewels of astonishing beauty, and went to war when they were stolen. His defect was exceeding pride in the work of his hands. The tragedy of the Elves to some extent is the tragedy of the artists. Ultimately it is the virtues of the humble Hobbits rather than the magnificence of the Elves that will prevail. Music, like science, offers mere potential for good; the good is sui generis. For art to serve the good, the artist must first be good. Benedict XVI, as noted, stated that "reverence, receptivity and humility" characterize the musician whose art exalts rather than confuses the listener. Religion can engage art as its servant only after it has converted the artist.

Is DVC anti-Christian?

The question is put: "Is 'The Da Vinci Code' anti-Christian?"

Well, I haven't read the book, but I guess I gotta, because it's all we're going to be talking about for the next few weeks. Why haven't I read the book? Because I can't stay on top of all the good stuff I want and need to read for my job. Why should I waste time reading a trashy novel? The answer, of course, is that millions of people are doing so, and taking it quite seriously. If you're going to comment knowledgeably on pop culture, you need to read it. OK, fine, I accept that. I'll read the thing.

Still, I can say without fear that my future DVC-reading experience will confirm my sense that yes, DVC is anti-Christian. From what I'm given to understand from reading all the media and blog coverage of the book, it's not anti-Christian in the way that "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" is anti-Jewish. Nobody's likely to go out and play whack-a-mole with Catholics over this book. Nevertheless, it counts in my mind as anti-Christian because it presents as fact, or possible fact, the idea that Jesus was not divine, and that he impregnated Mary Magdalene, who ran off to France and spawned a "royal" bloodline from Jesus. The Bible, indeed Christianity itself, is a sham religion run by powerful men who constructed it and lie about it to keep women suppressed and themselves in power. If what Dan Brown has written is taken as true, or possibly true, then Christianity is a lie, and Christians would do well to go out, get rich, get drunk and get laid, for tomorrow we shall die. If Dan Brown were open about the fact that he's written an exciting yarn, Christians could moan about the book, but it wouldn't be quite so damaging. But Brown pretends that there is truth here, and there are many, many people who believe him.

Bottom line: DVC is anti-Christian because it is based on lies that, if taken to be true (as the author apparently desires), would result in people holding the Christian religion in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular in contempt. It denies the entire basis of the Christian religion.

There is something deep within the human psyche that makes us susceptible to conspiracy theory. We have a deep need to believe this kind of rubbish. I think it has to do with control. If DVC is true, then it gives shmoes like me and thee a sense of power over the Catholic Church. Ah ha, you think you're so great, but we've got your number, Pope! DVC becomes a convenient theory on which to hang a lot of one's emotional complaints about Catholicism, or Christianity. More broadly, people love conspiracy theory because however outlandish, it provides them with a sense of order amid terrifying chaos. It is terrifying to think that monarchies could fall, or a president could be assassinated by a lone gunman, or that a bunch of nimrods armed with nothing but boxcutters and conviction could take down the Twin Towers -- terrifying, that is, because it shows how much tectonic damage can be done to our social and psychological order by the evil of a handful of rabble. So we invent grand conspiracies to put the demon of chaos back in the box.

It seems that we are at a period in our culture in which the seeds of conspiracy theory fall in very fertile soil. Stephen Colbert's concept of "truthiness" is actually quite helpful here. It refers to the phenomenon in which people choose to believe a claim because it sounds truthful to them; i.e., it confirms what they feel is the truth. Believe me, here on the editorial page of a major metropolitan newspaper, we're dealing with truthiness all the time. You'd be amazed (or maybe not) by how people on both the left and the right are convinced that the media are a secret cabal out to protect Bush, or a secret cabal out to hide good news from Iraq, or ... well, it never ends. It's actually depressing to see how many people we deal with are unwilling to enterta in facts or ideas that counteract what they feel in their heart must be true. And of course none of us are immune to that temptation, I must confess.

It is impossible to argue with someone whose mind is in the vise grip of Truthiness. I blogged here the other day about someone in my family who called me last year to tell me I really needed to read DVC because I might learn something about the Catholic Church. I told my relative that the book is actually based on some easily disproven lies about Church history. "Well, that's your opinion," said my relative, who would not be budged. The thing that got to me most of all about this was my relative's firm conviction that one person's opinion is as good as anybody else's, and the barely disguised view that my attempt to claim to know more than her about history was in fact a rude attempt to put her in her place because hey, Rod can't handle the truth.

The democratization of expertise. The populist validation of ignorance. The triumph of emotion over reason. You know what we say here in the Republic of Truthiness: If it feels good, believe it.

Sign of the times

Catholic bishops in Belgium are allowing Muslim "refugees" to take over their churches, offering them sanctuary in hopes of preventing the government from deporting them (they're in the country illegally). In one church, the Muslims are being allowed to cover a statue of the Virgin so as not to offend the eyes of the Islamic squatters. Paul Belien at Brussels Journal says:

For Catholic believers the situation is all the more painful as the same Bishops have never bothered to take any action to change, let alone, protest Belgium’s legislation regarding abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage and gay adoption. On the contrary, when a Catholic organisation asked for permission to organize a Mass against the impending euthanasia legislation in Brussels Cathedral on 2 March 2002, the use of the Cathedral was prohibited by Cardinal Danneels because it was feared that (Catholic) politicians of the anti-immigration Vlaams Belang party would attend.

Good Shepherds? Er, no.

Over at Amy's, a reader writes to ask if he/she was the only one who heard a homily yesterday on the parable of the Good Shepherd as relates to "Brokeback Mountain." Actually, the two protagonists in "Brokeback Mountain" were awful shepherds -- they let wild animals kill some of their flock, and they lost some of their sheep when they let them get confused and mix in with other herds. Why did they do this? Because they were so busy getting jiggy with each other, and attending to their own sex lives, that they became derelict in their duties, and the trust that had been placed in them over the lives of those animals.

Come to think of it, "Brokeback Mountain" might well have been a very apt analogy to explain the parable of the Good Shepherd -- just not in the way Amy's reader's priest intended.

McCain to Canossa?

Sen. John McCain is headed to Jerry Falwell's Liberty University to deliver the commencement address on Saturday What does this mean? Is this McCain, realizing from bitter experience that he cannot win the GOP presidential nomination against the wishes of religious conservatives, making a walk to Canossa? Or is this the Rev. Falwell, understanding that the Religious Right's star is falling within the broader conservative movement, cannily hitching his own wagon to the mainstream Republican figure who stands the best chance of winning in 2008 -- this, to keep religious conservatives relevant to GOP king-making?

My guess? Both. Falwell wrote a graceful op-ed in the NYT saying point-blank that his invitation to McCain was not an endorsement of McCain's presidential bid, but rather a recognition that McCain is an exemplary public servant whose wisdom and example Liberty students can profit from. Well and good. But it's also true that the conservative movement is plainly in trouble, and both men need each other.

McCain's presidential ambitions in 2000 crashed and burned after he reacted emotionally to the vicious campaign Pat Robertson et alia ran against him in the South Carolina primaries. McCain flew to Norfolk, Va., Robertson's hometown, and delivered an intemperate broadside denouncing both Falwell and Robertson as "agents of intolerance," and later squawking about their "evil influence" in the GOP. McCain had ample cause to be upset with them, given the dirty politics Christian conservatives played on Bush's behalf in SC. But it was a foolish move on his part.

Googling around for a transcript of McCain's Norfolk remarks, I ran across this great WaPo piece from yesterday by Byron York, explaining why it's in the interest of both McCain and Falwell to bury grudges. This makes me happy. At this early stage in the prognostication, I think the only way the GOP keeps the White House in 2008 is by either nominating McCain, or if the Dems nominate Hillary. I was a McCain supporter during the 2000 GOP primaries, and I thought he got a bum rap from Christian conservatives on the pro-life issue (McCain himself has said that if the media that loves him so much ever stopped to examine how socially conservative his voting record is, they'd be startled). Though I disagree with his immigration stance now, and I never have liked his view on campaign finance, I think McCain is the best candidate among the GOP hopefuls. Why? First, he will be the only US political figure with the status to disengage us from Iraq with honor, and second, because I think he's the only GOP figure who is both trustworthy on life issues and who has the capability to win. I'm all about Santorum on these issues, but I don't think he can win national office (though he might make a strong running mate for McCain).

Bottom line: it's a very good thing for conservatives that McCain and Falwell are making nice. I think it elevates the stature of both men.

Art and religion

On this lovely Sunday afternoon here in Dallas, I took a walk down to a used bookstore I hadn't yet visited. There I found a thin hardback volume called, I think, "Art and Religion: The Letters of Jacques Maritain and Jean Cocteau." It was a first English edition from the 1940s, and I couldn't afford it, but I did read as much as I could without feeling like I was stealing. The book collected a short correspondence from the 1920s between the great Thomist philosopher and the celebrated French artist. Something Cocteau wrote caught my eye. I didn't have a pen to write the quote down, but it went something like this: "To confuse conventionality with humility is a very great error. God does not like lukewarmness. He wants us to be bold or to be silent. The poets and the monks are the ones he raises up most high."

There was a passage in Maritain's response that lingered with me as I walked on to meet a Catholic friend on the patio of a Mexican restaurant. Maritain said that he sympathizes with the Renaissance popes who gave the Church over to an orgy of beauty, and attracted the ire of the Reformers, who wanted more morals. I wish I could remember the reasons the philosopher gave! He went on to say that each era in the life of the Church has its own failings. In the 19th century, he said, the Church gave itself over to too much moralism. As I was recounting this to my friend over ice-cold Tecate and tortilla chips, I said that it seems to be the dreadful curse of our Catholic era to endure a church that has exiled both morality and beauty!

"If you had to choose," I asked my friend, "would you rather be in a church that was all morality and no beauty, or all beauty and no morality."

"All morality, easy," my friend said, without hesitating.

"That's a lot harder for me," I said. "I think I would find it a lot easier to live with the beauty absent the morality. I could supply the morality, but I find it hard to relate to God and to feel His presence absent sensuality."

Both examples are decadent, I think. In Divine Liturgy today, Archbishop Dmitri talked about how the physical world is a "roadmap to God." I think there is no higher example of that than the liturgy and the sacraments, at least for me. As even a stout old atheist like H.L. Mencken knew, religion is poetry, not syllogism.

Nota bene

A note to all of you who are writing me privately about the Catholic/Orthodox dilemma. I am reading all of your mail and taking it to heart, but I'm getting so much of it from both sides that I can't possibly acknowledge it all personally, much less offer an adequate reply. Please know that I truly appreciate that you care so much that you'd sit down to write to me, a stranger, about this matter. And above all, I thank you for your prayers. I am convinced that both you Catholics and you Orthodox, as well as the handful of Protestants I've heard from, are all doing God's work in helping me sort through this, by both your words and your prayers.

The big Crunchy Con tent

Check out this wonderful letter from a reader of my book:

Your book "Crunchy Cons" gave me a lot to think about.

I am not a "crunchy con" in the terms you describe: I guess that most people would describe me as "liberal", but I don't like boxes.

I do some of the things you describe but from liberal rather than conservative motives:

I sometimes recycle, I am a vegetarian although not a vegan, I buy about 1/2 of my clothes from thrift stores: feeling that that way although the clothes are from sweatshops, they are secondhand sweatshop clothes, I go on peace marches, and have actually been arrested a couple of times for civil disobedience, and I am exploring how to integrate nonviolence into my life. However I am not a total pacifist: as I would have fought in World War II: and believe there are a few times when fighting is better than tolerating evil. But I am very involved in Soulforce, an interfaith movement working for LGBT rights by practicing nonviolence.

However, there are commonalities, including: a belief in smallness rather than mass media,in community, in people and nature rather than the acquisition of "things", a concern about children,particularly about education and not abandoning them to the "culture", a belief in smallness including local communities, that life is sacred, an unease over the mass culture including media.

I suppose I am conservative in my belief in small business (as opposed to large): I was encouraged to read about a nonprofit which makes donations of microloans to women so they can start their own small businesses and escape from poverty that way; I believe that most people when given the chance, would work rather than be given a handout; and that work and accomplishments provide dignity and self-esteem as opposed to trying to "give people self esteem". And that kids are sexualized too soon and should be allowed to be kids: instead of being forced to sit stil at age 3, learn to read in preschool, and labeled as A.D.D. if they can't do so: I have even read to my shock, about an anger management program for 2-year olds. Let kids be kids. I am also very interested in spirituality, and am involved in several interfaith groups exploring this.

I also support the family and agree that it is very important. I am in a 12 year same gender marriage, and my own family is not about "self indulgence" or lust, but about sticking by each other during the hard times, and putting the other partner, and the relationship, first above one's self interest, including sticking by my partner through her chemotherapy and radiation treatment for breast cancer. Being with a man was never an option for me: the other option would have been to be single: and that would have been the self-indulgent life: it is by having a same gender marriage that I can experience the richness and gifts of putting the other person first. So one of the bottom lines for many conservatives, the family, I agree with: however I do not agree with some of them that this means excluding certain people from the definition of family: this is not an "issue" for me but is vital as it hits home and hits directly at my own family.

One thing I really got from your book, was to remind myself that if life isn't lived with joy, it isn't lived at all: for example, I want to look at my vegetarianism and make sure it isn't about Puritanism and negatives (i.e. what I DON'T eat) but about enjoying the foods that I choose to eat. And lightening up and not being rigid: do things out of enjoyment and because they enhance the sacredness of life, rather than as "shoulds".

Also reminding myself to not assume that if a person is a conservative, that they will not have things in common: after all they may be a crunchy conservative.

Truth in love

Warm, witty reflections from the Orthodox priest Father Joseph Hunnycutt on the search for religious Truth and the blogosphere.

But do they want to?

Wilfred McClay gave a speech earlier this year that ought to be shouted from the rooftops. Here are the money grafs:

We often fail to remember what a socially conservative coalition, by our standards today, the New Deal era Democratic Party was, with its essential contingents of Northern Catholics and Southern Protestants. In today’s Democratic Party, white Southern Protestants are largely gone, and the Catholic vote has split, and is trending more and more toward the Republicans. Much of the latter change can be attributed to rank-and-file Catholic disaffection with the Democratic party’s decision to give issues of cultural “values”—and most particularly issues that relate to the individualistic concerns of sexuality and expressive freedom, and abortion rights in particular—a prominence and energy that they felt it was no longer given to larger economic and political issues, and that offended them deeply. This emphasis has not yet cost the Democrats their entire Catholic constituency, but it has cost them a very large part of it, and perhaps the most commitedly Catholic part of it. The trend shows no sign of reversing in any decisive way. Many Catholics who now routinely vote Republican clearly still do not feel at ease about it. But with each passing election, they are less reluctant.


The loss of its morally and socially conservative but politically progressive Catholics has been a calamity, then, for the Democratic Party, and has seriously undermined its claim to be the vehicle of an effective and humane progressive politics. It is often argued that the socially conservative positions of Republicans are at odds with their support for unregulated capitalism, which serves as a ceaseless engine of social disruption, and a force perpetuating social inequality. But anyone putting forward that argument has to be willing to face up to an equally serious problem on the other side—that the extreme individualism presumed by so many of the current Democratic social policies, with their disdain for tradition and their obsession with liberatory rights-talk and atomistic privacy, is at odds with any sustained effort to foster notions of mutuality, accountability, community, and social responsibility.


Christopher Lasch argued that one of the chief errors of the postwar left was its choice of cultural radicalism, which succeeded, over serious political and economic reform, which failed completely. I think he was right about that, and the loss of the socially and morally conservative Catholics, who were—in a sense—very much like the socially and morally conservative Protestants that John Dewey described, is one of the chief casualties of that error. Both groups had a religiously derived vision of the human person, a vision that is fruitfully at odds with our American liberal individualism, and that could yet enrich a progressive politics that concentrated on the right issues, and once again respected their moral outlook. Both are still available for that purpose, if progressives can to find a way back to them. And if they want to.

Groveling

I know I'm gonna get hate mail on this, but I have to say I found it pathetic that Patrick Kennedy stood there and whined about his "sickness" as he was headed out the door to rehab. I don't deny that alcoholism and drug addiction can be a medical condition. I have seen it play out horribly with friends and family members. But good grief, that was such a transparent attempt by a very irresponsible member of an arrogant and privileged family to portray himself as a victim.

Look, I hope he conquers his addictions and gets his act together. But I find it impossible to feel sorry for a man who stands there and basically says to the media, "I'm a victim of disease and mental illness." He may well be, but it would be the manlier thing to do to say, "This isn't the first time I've disgraced my office by reckless behavior. The people of Rhode Island deserve better. I will resign and dedicate myself to conquering my demons."

And yes, I'd feel that way if he was a Republican and his last name wasn't Kennedy.

Baylor update

CC readers will remember my blogging the other day about Baylor University president John Lilley's session with the Dallas Morning News editorial board, in which I asked him repeatedly about a recent incident at the university in which an undergraduate member of a student satirical society appeared at a school event dressed as a pregnant nun. Catholics on campus at the Baptist university were offended, and the Catholic bishop of Austin spoke out publicly about it. In our session earlier this week with Dr. Lilley, he said that the best way to handle things like this is just to laugh it off.

Well, a reader points out that Baylor's administration back in 2002 didn't laugh off Baylor undergrads who appeared in Playboy. It disciplined them. On what grounds? According to the university's press release:

The basis for the University's disciplinary action was its expectation, as detailed in the Student Handbook, that students conduct themselves "in accordance with Christian principles as commonly perceived by Texas Baptists. Personal misconduct either on or off the campus by anyone connected with Baylor detracts from the Christian witness Baylor strives to present to the world and hinders full accomplishment of the mission of the university."

Well, this changes things. I'm pretty much a maximalist on campus speech, but if this is still in the Baylor handbook, it does raise the question about whether a student appearing in pregnant nun drag is "in accordance with Christian principles as commonly perceived by Texas Baptists" and if that act "detracts from the Christian witness Baylor strives to present to the world."

Dr. Lilley should explain why he thinks that the pregnant nun stunt accords with Texas Baptist principles, and does not detract from Baylor's Christian witness. Is mocking Catholicism a Texas Baptist principle? Surely not -- I know too many Texas Baptists who would never applaud such a thing, or view it with indifference. And if the Baylor president thinks the stunt does violate the school's policy, then why won't he say so?

Stop the presses! It's a new mall!

The big front-page story in today's Dallas Morning News is the grand re-opening of North Park, the Dallas shopping center which today becomes Texas' largest mall. I could not possibly agree more with the news judgment that landed this story smack in the middle of page one, with a big spread. Maybe in another part of the country this might seem like advertising masquerading as news, but in Dallas, it is real news -- if news is what people are really thinking and talking about, as distinct from what editors like me think they should be thinking and talking about.

But -- and you knew that there would be a "but" coming from me -- I gotta wonder what kind of culture gets so ga-ga over shopping? I'm not anti-commercial, and though I am allergic to shopping malls, I take genuine pleasure in going shopping from time to time for the things I'm most interested in -- books, food and wine, for the most part. Still, it is no exaggeration to say that shopping is a very common form of recreation here in Dallas, and I'd guess in most of America. Neuroscientist Dr. Peter C. Whybrow argues that this is a function of evolution, both of human brain chemistry and the aggressive acquisitiveness of immigrant-spawned American culture. Here's what he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Q: How do we know when enough is enough? If it's built in to us to strive for more?

A: First, you have to ask the question. We have no upper limits that are built into our biology. Therefore, the only thing that can help us here is our intellect. And we actually have a powerful intellect. We have got caught up in the idea that "enough" is related to material gain.

If you ask people what they really want most in the world, they don't say a new refrigerator, or a new television set, or a larger set of dinner plates. What they say is, I want more intimacy with my friends and my family. Or I want to be loved by the person that I love. We are very creative creatures, but our success lies not just in our intelligence but in our use of that intelligence in a collaborative, collective way. It's with our friends, family and extended communities that we are successful, and we've lost sight of that.

That was the image of the Founding Fathers: We were going to start a new order of the ages, a place where we would have a balance among people and need and gain. We've lost track of that. I think we've shot past this balance into this frenzy.

Yeah ... so?

Via Michelle Malkin, I found this commonsense column by the invaluable Heather Mac Donald, who wonders why the MSM clutched its collective pearls over how illegal immigrants were living in new fear that the stepped-up enforcement of American laws would find them out. Well, duh! They should be afraid -- they're breaking the law. Writes Mac Donald:

The bargain they chose was clear: if you come here illegally, the law says that you should face deportation. It is a measure of how surreal our immigration practice has become that it is now “mean-spirited” simply to raise the possibility in an illegal’s mind that his deportation risk is real, much less actually to deport him.

Meanwhile, there's a good piece in The New Republic (sorry, you have to subscribe to read it) arguing that Americans aren't talking about what really bothers them about illegal immigration. Peter Skerry and Devin Fernandes say that the problem is being mis-framed as one of illegal immigrants versus legal immigrants -- as if conferring legality on some and keeping illegals out would solve the problem. They say that the real problem has nothing to do with the legal status of immigrants, but with immigration itself. Many people, they say, have a legitimate concern about what mass immigration from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America is doing to America's social fabric, which is arguably being frayed by the country's inability to assimilate so many of these immigrants at the present time. What we need, they argue, is to figure out a way to give the Latino migrants who are here a way to become truly American -- not merely as a matter of legal status, but existentially. Current proposals -- the guest-worker program, say -- would do nothing in that regard, because it would not encourage Mexicans living here to put down roots.

Write Skerry and Fernandes: "Changing behavior and reknitting the social fabric is a much more difficult project than revising formal rules." But it's the only thing that'll work in the long run. Makes sense to me.

Stay at home moms

If stay-at-home moms got paid a salary for the work they do, they'd pull in about $134,000 a year, according to a new survey. That would make my wife the major breadwinner in our family by far.

"What is Truth?"

...as someone infamously asked.

I want to start a new thread off the "Orthodoxy and Me" one below. While I don't intend to say any more about my own consideration of converting from Catholicism to Orthodoxy, I do hope to move the discussion (for those who are interested) beyond my own situation, and into a less personal discussion of the nature of religious truth.

Some readers in the Orthodoxy/Catholicism discussion are fixed on the point that one has a firm obligation to remain where the Truth is taught, no matter how painful that might be. I understand that -- oh boy, do I. It's what has kept me Catholic for the past couple of years. I am not a relativist. I could not imagine embracing a faith that I thought was in some sense untrue, no matter how much I wanted to do so. (And please, do not insult me by suggesting that this crisis of faith is about contraception.)

However, true religion -- or at least true Christianity -- can never be mere assent to propositions. It has to be incarnate to have meaning (faith without works is dead, after all). Religious truth is something existential as well as propositional. Kierkegaard provided a helpful way to think about this when he wrote, "Truth is subjective." He wasn't stating a relativist credo. No, what he meant was that truths that are worth living and dying for -- love, faith, etc. -- only have meaning if they are appropriated inwardly. Let me be very clear here: Kierkegaard was a devout Christian, and he would never have argued that Jesus was the Son of God only for those who believed he was. Kierkegaard thought the proposition "Jesus is the Son of God" was an objective fact. His insight was to show that that was the kind of objective fact that only changed things insofar as individual human beings -- subjects -- took that truth into their hearts and lived by it.

The questions that interest me at the moment have to do with the nature of how we are supposed to relate to the Truth. It is complicated for Christians, because we believe the the Truth is not an abstract principle, but a Person who said that he was the Way, the Truth and the Life. What do we do with that fact?

I have always had little sympathy for people who run around from this church to that church, claiming to be led by the Holy Spirit. It seems to me that they are really just following their own whims. And maybe they are. But I don't think the story is quite so cut and dried for everybody. A good friend is an Evangelical, though he grew up Greek Orthodox; he says he didn't discover Christ until he was in college, and became a born-again Evangelical. He says he honors the Orthodox Church he was raised in, but it is for him nothing more than empty ritual and the tribe at prayer. He said he needed Jesus too much to stay where He couldn't be found -- even though my friend readily admits that many Christians do find Jesus in Greek Orthodoxy.

I think my friend puts too much emphasis on experience and worship. But I think that in the past, I put too much weight on doctrine.

My question comes down to this: with particular reference to ecclesiology, what does it mean for a Christian to live in Truth?

Louisiana masala

Thanks to Jonah, I've just learned about what sounds like the most perfect cookbook since the last thing Marcella Hazan wrote: "Saffron to Sassafras", a combination of Indian and Cajun recipes compiled by members of the Indian community living in Baton Rouge. The proceeds go to benefit a program to help battered women. How can you lose? I'm all for charity, but more than that, I love to eat hot food. The hotta da betta. You come to Dallas in the summer, I'll feed you some of my napalm-like green dragon salsa: roasted tomatillos, roasted habaneros, onions, garlic, salt, lime. My wife thinks a Hazmat team ought to be on standby whenever I make it. Sublime!

The Suicide of Europe

I find that when I have conversations with smart journalists about the birthrate collapse in Europe, the first thing many of them bring up is Hitler's plans to breed Aryan youth for the greater glory of Germany. That is to say, it's impossible to talk frankly about what's happening to Europe on this front without many people defaulting to Nazism, and making a discussion impossible. The argument seems to be, "The Nazis were concerned about birthrates in Europe, so anybody who brings that up must be a crypto-Nazi."

Despite this Henny-Pennyism, Europe's collapsing birthrate is a big, big deal, one with enormous consequences for Americans. Here are George Weigel's latest words on the matter. Did you know that by 2050, if current trends continue, about 60 percent of Italians will not know from personal experience what a sister, brother, aunt, uncle or cousin is? In the linked Commentary essay, Weigel says the demographic collapse in Europe is inextricably linked to the culture war European secular elites have long waged on Christianity. By killing the founding cult of postclassical European civilization, they have killed the culture. Islam remains to inherit what the Europeans have abandoned. Writes Weigel:

However loudly European postmodernists may proclaim their devotion to the relativity of all truths, in practice this translates into something very different—namely, the deprecation of traditional Western truths, combined with a studied deference to non- or anti-Western ones. In the relativist mindset, it thus turns out, not all religious and moral conviction is bigotry that must be suppressed; only the Judeo-Christian variety is. In short, the moral relativism of Europe is often mere window-dressing, a mask for Western self-hatred.

For another, related thing, Europe’s soul-withering skepticism goes hand in hand with what Allan Bloom once styled “debonair nihilism”—a nihilism that, in its indifference to everything beyond the imperial self, has made its own contribution to the continent’s unwillingness to create the future by creating successor generations. ...[It] is radical personal autonomy that has helped lead Europe into steep demographic decline; it is radical personal autonomy that has brought Europe to denigrate its own civilizational achievements, seeing in its history only repression and intolerance; and it is radical personal autonomy that underwrites political correctness and its corrosive effects on Europe’s capacity to defend itself against internal Islamist aggression.

Oswald Spengler, I believe, observed nearly a century ago that when a people have to be persuaded of the value of having children, it's over for them.

Why so mean to Democrats?

Somebody in the comboxes asked why I'm so hard on the Democrats. Hey, I wrote an entire book slamming the faults of the Republicans, my own side! I am weary of the philosophical ruts that both parties have fallen into, and see little hope in the rage against the Other that partisans of both sides use to fuel their enthusiasm. Emoting is not thinking, and leads to truthiness on both sides (see David Brooks' column today -- well, you can't because it's behind the Times firewall -- in which he condemns Kevin Phillips' new book as an example of truthiness that satisfies liberal paranoia, but has little to do with the real world; I think much conservative defensiveness about the state of the war in Iraq is truthy).

I don't expect to reach harmonic convergence with liberals; to do that, I would cease to be a conservative, or they would cease to be liberal. But I do have this increasing fear that the problems our country faces are so serious that we can't afford the luxury of politics as usual -- the standard left-right sniping that we're all so tired of, or ought to be. This is not, I stress, to say that we should abandon our liberal or conservative principles for the sake of bland consensus. I am saying, though, that the terms "liberal" and "conservative" seem more and more to be deployed in the public square merely -- merely -- as a way of identifying Friend or Foe. I wonder how long we can afford this.

Yesterday at the Dallas Morning News, we received a visit from Daniel Kurtzer, who was President Clinton's ambassador to Egypt, and President Bush 43's ambassador to Israel. We spent a gloomy hour talking about the immense challenges now facing us in the Mideast (e.g., Amb. Kurtzer thinks that Iraq is headed to civil war, "if it's not there already"). At the end, I said to him that the GOP is tapped out on foreign policy ideas, and the Democrats are offering nothing substantive by way of contrast. Who are the inventive foreign policy thinkers in Washington today? I asked.

He thought for a moment, then said, "I don't have an answer for you."

My editor replied, "That's the most depressing thing you've said all afternoon."

And it was. America and the world are in the middle of a serious crisis in the Middle East, and nobody seems to know what to do. Our partisan domestic politics remind one of fiddling while Rome burns. Aren't you tired of the fiddling? Wouldn't you like to see American politicians of the left and right thinking more of the common good and less of short-term partisan advantage?

Blogosphere on Style section

TMatt at Get Religion says the WaPo piece was nice enough, but obsessed with the surface of things, not caring to dig down too deeply into the book's ideas (Dan Larison concurs). Katolik Shinja is worried that my temptation to Orthodoxy is indicative of a consumerist mentality toward religion -- choosing what feels right, as opposed to what's true.

A great question -- the question in front of me, actually -- and I'm struggling not only to determine what is true doctrinally, but how to renew my Catholicism if I should conclude, after my discernment, that Catholicism is true. It's a Kierkegaardian dilemma -- what good is truth if it is not subjective, by which I mean able to be appropriated and incarnated in the life of a subject? What does one do if one recognizes that (say) Catholicism is true, but for whatever reason it remains only a cerebral thing, and one has genuine trouble revivifying it in one's life?

Stan Guthrie at Christianity Today published his interview with Your Working Boy, in which I helpfully clarify matters:

Why are you, as a Christian, a crunchy conservative rather than a crunchy liberal?

Chiefly it has to do with what Pope John Paul II called "culture of life" issues. Not only am I pro-life, but I'm also extremely concerned about
biotechnology, cloning, stem cells, and issues like that, which get a serious hearing in Republican Party circles, but not in Democratic circles. The demonization of pro-lifers among liberals is terribly unfortunate, because Democrats could appeal to people like me if they didn't seem to treat religious and social conservatives as anathema. I can make an argument against the death penalty in Republican circles. It's not a popular argument, but I can get a fair hearing. I don't know any pro-life Democrats who can make their argument within
their circles and get a fair hearing.

Do you have to grow your own vegetables and wear Birkenstocks to be a crunchy con?

No, not at all! What this is ultimately about is not organic vegetables or our sartorial choices but how we choose to order our lives in relation to the material world. Ultimately, faith and family are at the center of crunchy conservatism—no matter what you put on your feet.

Moussaoui gets life, not death

That was a foolish and unjust verdict. The man deserves to die--and I say that as someone who is generally against the death penalty.

I mean, most convicted killers deserve to die, but I am generally in favor of granting them the mercy of life in prison, because, following the teaching of the Catholic Church, it is possible to protect society from them without resorting to bloody means.

In the Moussaoui case, I can easily see him becoming a cause celebre in the Islamic world, and possibly even used as an incitement for Islamist terrorists to take Western hostages to exchange for him. As long as he lives and breathes, we are going to be in serious danger.

Somehow, though, I don't know how long a man who taunted America and Americans in the courtroom today will last in prison. And I can't say the prospect of rough prison justice finding its way to Mama Moussaoui's little boy bothers me all that much.

Ray Nagin, loser of all losers

Byron York has been posting absolutely devastating material about New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, from a Douglas Brinkley profile in Vanity Fair. See here and here and most especially -- Ray Nagin thrown out of the bathroom on Air Force One! -- here. What a complete disgrace this clown is. And yet, not off the charts for a Louisiana politician.

Re: Caitlin Flanagan

In the comboxes below, a reader writes that being a stay-at-home mom is something only wealthy people like Caitlin Flanagan can do. She (the reader) writes that if she quit her job to do that, she'd have to live in a "vile" neighborhood and do housework all day.

Well, yeah, unless your husband is wealthy, you will not be able to live in a neighborhood as nice as you might do otherwise, and you will have to do unpleasant things like dishes. But it has its rewards. It can be done, but you have to be willing to make do with less. I agree that Flanagan is not the best example, because she does have household help, but the reader is being way too defensive here. The point to be taken from Flanagan's essay is not, "Is Caitlin Flanagan a bad woman?" No, the point is how come the Democratic Party seems dead-set on marginalizing and even running off women (and men) who are traditionalists about family life?

Forget C.F. for a second; what if that were written by one of the many women I know who are living in a much smaller and less nice house than they might otherwise live in, all because they chose to stay at home to keep house and raise children? The argument would still be the same, because I know from my wife's experience that there is a certain kind of liberal Democrat who looks down on women who make those choices as fools who don't know what's best for them. These are women who might be open to the Democratic message on the economy, health care, the environment and suchlike. But they are not going to sign on for a party that looks down its nose on them for their choices. For all its flaws, the GOP makes room for both career women and stay-at-home moms. Flanagan is a flawed messenger, but the message is one worth taking seriously.

It's the contempt, stupid

Caitlin Flanagan nails it, just nails it, in this Time magazine essay in which she argues that the Democratic Party stupidly and self-destructively alienates traditionalist churchgoing people. Here's an excerpt, but you really should read the whole thing:

I am a 44-year-old woman who grew up in Berkeley who has never once voted for a Republican, or crossed a picket line, or failed to send in a small check when the Doctors Without Borders envelope showed up. I believe that we should not have invaded Iraq, that we should have signed the Kyoto treaty, that the Starr Report was, in part, the result of a vast right-wing conspiracy. I believe that poverty is our most pressing issue and that we should be pouring money and energy into its eradication. I believe that allowing migrant women and children to die of thirst in American deserts is a moral transgression that will stain us forever.

But despite all that, there is apparently no room for me in the Democratic Party. In fact, I have spent much of the past week on a forced march to the G.O.P. ... I'm not leaving, but sometimes I wonder: When did I sign up to be the beaten wife of the Democratic Party?

Here's why they're after me: I have made a lifestyle choice that they can't stand, and I'm not cowering in the closet because of it. I'm out, and I'm proud. I am a happy member of an exceedingly "traditional" family. I'm in charge of the house and the kids, my husband is in charge of the finances and the car maintenance, and we all go to church every Sunday.

...The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the great work of the '60s--civil rights, women's liberation, gay inclusion--we decided to stigmatize the white male. The union dues--paying, churchgoing, beer-drinking family man got nothing but ridicule and venom from us. So he dumped us. And he took the wife and kids with him.

Yes, yes, yes. In today's Democratic Party, the bottom line is: defend the sexual revolution at all costs. If you are a traitor to the sexual revolution, you are of no use to us. Thirty-four years after the cultural left captured the party leadership at the 1972 convention, is that still where the party of Roosevelt and Truman wants to take its stand?

I keep thinking that the fault lines of American politics are shifting, and that the old labels of "liberal" and "conservative" now serve to obscure, not clarify.

Orthodoxy and me

Note: I've combined the Orthodoxy post into one long one, and shortened it a bit, to separate it out from the WaPo story piece. -- RD.

It will come as a surprise to some readers of the WaPo story, though maybe not much of one, that Julie and I are considering Orthodoxy. I've not blogged about this before, because to be perfectly frank, it is an agonizing thing for us, and I don't know how this is going to come out. I've been a fellow traveler of the Orthodox for years (I'm "Rod the Journalist" in my pal Frederica Mathewes-Green's "Facing East"), and have also been critical of the Orthodox (e.g., my Wall Street Journal jab at the Greek Orthodox for being such knotheads about John Paul II). I became enamored of Eastern Christianity as a parishioner at the Maronite cathedral in Brooklyn, and came to value the intensely poetic and mystical Eastern Rite liturgy.

What moved us to consider Orthodoxy? It's a long story, but to cut to the chase, there were two things. The most acute was complete burnout over the Catholic sex-abuse scandal. I have always kept squarely in front of me the crucial point made by Father Andrew Greeley, who said that even if the Catholic church was run by psychopathic tyrants, that has nothing whatever to do with whether or not the Catholic faith is true. He is correct. That insight kept me solidly Catholic despite all the horrible things I was learning about church corruption and abuse of children. Nevertheless, the constant fear and anger I couldn't shake off began to eat away at me. Without my realizing it, my faith had become a cerebral thing.

We found a parish that we loved, and started finally to make friends in church. And then we learned, quite by accident, that the man we took to be the assistant pastor, a man we actually liked a lot, had been formally suspended by the Diocese of Scranton after a formal sex-abuse allegation. He had been quietly put into ministry by the pastor of this parish, who deliberately decided not to tell the bishop or the congregation about the priest's past. The priest had lied separately to me and to a friend about his past, and in a manipulative way. (Here's the story on how and why I blew the whistle on this priest.)

Discovering this was the last straw for me. It was shattering. Still, I think that if I was basically in a solid place as a Catholics in terms of parish life, I might have been able to weather it. But I wasn't. Many's the time I've regretted how high-handed I was with my friend the Religion Reporter, who was leaving Evangelicalism for either Orthodoxy or Catholicism, he couldn't decide which. I made the argument -- this was 10 years ago -- for Catholicism. He said, "But I can't see raising my kids in Catholicism." I took umbrage at this, and thought he was making a comment about the sex abuse scandals of the past (this was 1996; little did I know what was in store for all of us). No, he said, you don't get it: I have small children that I want to keep Christian. I have been covering American religion for many years, and I know what life is like in most parishes. Over and over again, I have seen the magnificent teaching and witness of John Paul II and the Catholic tradition undermined and even rejected at the parish level. I honestly don't know if I could keep my kids Catholic in the American church -- or even Christian.

I humphed at this, and told him that if the arguments for Catholicism are true, that's all he needs to know, that the rest would sort itself out. He became Orthodox, and remains happily so today. Ten years on, I now know exactly what he meant.

We are now working and praying our way through this, seeking discernment. I'd never really considered the arguments for Orthodoxy; now I'm doing so. It's hard to separate the intellectual from the emotional in all this, especially because I really am a Papa Bear about protecting my kids, physically and spiritually. And yet, and yet ... is Catholicism true? Is Orthodoxy true? Is Orthodoxy true enough? (This is why Protestantism is out of the question; I have to be part of the historic apostolic church, and have the Sacraments; for me, that is possible only in RCism and Odoxy). Is it possible to live an authentic life of faith based only on cerebrality, on intellectual/doctrinal conviction? And if not, what do you do on Sunday morning?

I know too that there is no getting away from human brokenness and scandal, no matter what the church. This was brought home to us in a particularly bizarre way a couple of weeks ago, at the midnight Pascha service at a local Orthodox parish. As we stood in the congregation outside watching the procession, Julie said, "Omigod, Rod, we know that guy!" She pointed to a man in the crowd. It was Father Christopher Clay, in clerical garb. He had shown up with several young men in tow, and left with his entourage just before communion. Maybe this is God's way of saying, "You can run, but you can't hide."

"Crunchy Cons" in Style section

Last month, the Washington Post dispatched Style section reporter Hank Stuever to our humble abode to have dinner with the fambly, and write a piece about this whole crunchy con thing. Here it is. Have to say I'm pleased with it. It takes a few snarky shots at me, which is to be expected, but overall it was fair, and fun to read. Hank was a pleasure to have over to dinner, and I'm grateful for this piece. I'm especially glad that the impression he took away from hanging out with us for six hours was that we are a happy family. We are. Life is good. We are blessed.

George W. Carter?

Andrew Sullivan wonders if President Bush has been Carterized -- you know, at the bottom in the polls, tapped out, fallen and unable to get up. You can never bet against the ability of world crises to rally people around their president, but I think Andrew is probably more right than wrong. Did you see Bush come out yesterday, on the third anniversary of his "Mission Accomplished" speech? He was flanked by Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, and he made some kind of statement about something or other being a "turning point" for the people of Iraq. I didn't catch what event he was talking about -- probably Jaafari's replacement -- but I instantly disbelieved him. We've heard the "turning point" thing from the White House too many times regarding Iraq. I don't think there will be a turning point there anytime soon. Does anybody? And to be perfectly honest, watching the president make this statement yesterday, I wondered if he even believed it.

I'm sure some on the left are delighted by this. They're wrong to be. It's not good for the country to have a weak president, certainly not with our troops at war. I'm fed up with a very great deal from this administration and the GOP Congress, but I can't delight in the paralysis in Washington. Perhaps if I thought the Democrats had any real solutions to offer, I'd feel differently, but I think that both parties are pretty much tapped out now.

Conservatism and choice

Daniel Larison, in responding to Meilaender's criticism of "Crunchy Cons" in First Things, makes a very solid point:

Men like choice, but one of the fundamental things that conservatives need to relearn is that choice is unnatural. We were not created with choice, a choosing will. We were created with free will, and the difference between the two is all-important. Our choosing, deliberative will is not only a product of our fallen state, but the source of our continuing waywardness. Prizing choice is like prizing doubt and uncertainty. It is not something to be prized, but something to be restrained and mortified.

Having options is all very well and good, and all things being equal everyone usually likes to have some selection (whether we should pursue what we like seems to be a basic divide here), but Mr. Meilaender has all but proudly declared that choice, speed, efficiency and low cost are the priorities in how he makes decisions in life. This is how a lot of people live, including a lot of conservatives. That is part of our present reality, and there are some conservatives who think that being conservative is affirming whatever the present reality is, provided that taxes continue to go lower. How would they know any better, when their "intellectual" and political leadership have been telling them as much for a generation or more? These, of course, are real problems in a traditional conservative vision and they are some of the main points of the book.

Immigration and spirituality

A reader suggested in one of the comboxes that we should be talking about how Mexican and Central American immigration is going to affect American spirituality. Good point. It's obvious to say that it stands to make America a lot more Catholic, but it is less obvious (but still true) to say that it stands to make America a lot more Christian, period.

I live in a mixed Latino-Anglo neighborhood. On my block, there's a Latino Protestant house church. Ten minutes on foot from my house, there are several small Mexican Pentecostal congregations. I love this. There is also a botanica selling pagan/occult things, which I hate.

On balance, though, my sense is that the presence of more Latinos will be to the spiritual good of America. But I do confess I haven't thought this through. Anybody have any ideas to share?

This was a good letter from a conservative Christian reader in North Carolina, who suggests that the experience of living with people who have known great poverty, and are trying to overcome it, will teach us Americans something about the quality of mercy (to which I say: true, but what about all the other poor people who would like to come to America, but who are obliged to follow the law to do so? What do we say to them in their poverty?):

About twelve years ago, I worked as a restaurant manager in a place that was kitchen-staffed entirely by Mexicans. I got to know them very well, and did everything in my power to help them in whatever way possible. Usually this came in the form of car rides to the airport, hospital or wherever, and they paid back my kindness with their loyalty. If I needed them to do something in the kitchen, they did so without a lot of backtalk.

But a truism of human nature began to emerge, and that is: The poor express their thanks by asking for more.

It's difficult to comprehend when you are a self-supporting contributor to society, but what else can explain this human flood of the desperate? They say, give us more! I sometimes think that if we could only see them in the stark poverty of their homeland, our population at large would be more merciful.

Although it's a violation of my usual political sensibilities, amnesty is the only practical answer at this point in time. No other alternative - in spite of many people's "righteous" outrage - is do-able.

"Crunchy Con" reviews

I promised to say something about the First Things review of my book by Gilbert Meilaender once I'd read it. Well, now I have, and ... I'm not really sure where to begin, because I don't recognize in his piece the book I wrote. The review starts with the author enjoying a meal at Burger King, as I have and do from time to time, and takes off from there to dun "Crunchy Cons" as elitist nonsense (or "moral preening" as FT's blog had it). The point of the whole review, in fact, seems to be, "I like Burger King, and Rod Dreher is full of crap." There are some decent criticisms in the piece, don't get me wrong, but it's startling to see how an intelligent reviewer took words and phrases out of context and put the worst possible spin on them. I am grateful for any attention to the book, but it does seem that "Crunchy Cons" got on Meilaender's nerves in the worst way. For what it's worth, Spengler felt the same way about the review.

I think the First Things pan is the only review in the religious press that has been negative. I saw a generous review in the new issue of Crisis (the piece isn't online) by Tom Hibbs, for which I'm grateful. Seen any other reviews in the religious press of the book? Drop me a line at rdreher -at - dallasnews.com.

Froma Harrop, a sensible liberal, had some kind words in her syndicated column. Matt Continetti was fairly dismissive in yesterday's WaPo, saying that the book is "ultimately unpersuasive" because I offer no evidence that there are a lot of crunchy cons. True, I don't, but is that what makes the ideas unpersuasive? I wouldn't have any idea how to quantify who counts as a crunchy con, though it's a pretty good rule of thumb, I've found, that when you find a conservative homeschooler, you've got someone who is sympathetic to crunchy con principles. But Matt's review ended intrigutingly, saying of the book: "But it still suggests an answer to an important question: What happens when voters find themselves irritated at ideologically exhausted and rhetorically uninspiring political parties? The answer: They drop out of today's politics -- and begin quietly laying the foundation of tomorrow's."

In the early 1950s, I think it was, Lionel Trilling famously observed that liberalism wasn't the dominant intellectual mode of thought, it was the only one. And he was almost entirely right. There were libertarians and traditionalists trying to figure out how to revive the Right. There weren't that many of them, all things considered, but they believed in their ideas, and they didn't give up ... and within a generation, had changed the world. I think that the rest of this decade will be for both conservatism and liberalism about creating the next iteration of both movements. I hope "Crunchy Cons" has some contribution to make.

Baylor, Baptists and Catholics

Here at the News, we met this afternoon with Dr. John Lilley, the new president of Baptist-affiliated Baylor University. At the end, I asked him what he thought of a recent controversy in which a campus satirical group, the NoZe Bros., paraded a member in a university ceremony dressed as a pregnant Catholic nun. Some Catholics on Baylor's campus were offended, and wrote to the campus paper to say so. What does he think? I wanted to know.

Dr. Lilley talked at length about how the NoZe Bros. are wacky and outrageous and sometimes take things too far. I asked him if he thought they'd gone too far this time. Well ... he never did take a position, though he did say he thought the best way to handle things like this was to laugh at them.

He might be right, and I strongly disagree with the letter Austin, Texas Bishop Gregory Aymond sent to the Waco Tribune-Herald, in which the bishop wrote, "While we have freedom of speech, this does not mean freedom to offend or to ridicule another person or his religious tradition." Of course it does! The bishop should have been more careful in choosing his wording. The point to be made here is that just because you have the legal right to do something doesn't mean it's morally right.

I would have hoped that Dr. Lilley would have defended the right of the NoZe Bros. to do their vulgar skit, but at the same time disapproved of it. This is Texas, after all, and Baptists do not historically have good relations with Catholics. A close friend who is now Catholic told me that growing up in Dallas as a Baptist, she often went on mission trips to bring the Gospel to all the lost Catholics -- Catholics who were lost because they were Catholic, and therefore not Christian. I'm pleased that relations have gotten a lot better in recent years, and I often feel that I have more in common with Southern Baptists than with some of my own co-religionists.

If the Baylor president thinks it's merely a laughing matter to have Catholics mocked in this vulgar fashion, then I applaud him for at least being honest with the Dallas Morning News editorial board, and not saying the politically correct thing. Still, I wonder if he'd say the same thing if the NoZe Bros. dressed in blackface, or mocked Jews or Muslims. On second thought, I don't wonder at all.

Invincible ignorance

Amy deals with a woman who is committed not to truth, but to truthiness. I had a similar conversation once with a relative who called me up to ask me if I'd read "The Da Vinci Code." No, I have no interest, I told her.

"Well, you should," she said. "It says some very interesting things about the Catholic Church."

"And they're not true."

"Well, people have different opinions."

"Yes, and some of them are flat-out wrong, and not based on fact."

"That's your point of view. Everybody has a right to their own opinion."

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh!

Why the South mints good writers

Think of all the material! I just got this from my old pal Thomas, a fellow Louisiana native:

My father’s dachshund (Huey, named after Huey Long) was going to turn 16 in June. My folks had to put him down on Friday for a number of health reasons but there is such a nugget of humor in this that I had to share. Mother informed me that they buried Huey with a can of Miller Lite (his preferred beer) and positioned him facing East. Do you suspect other families have “flavor” such as this?

Well, my late Uncle Murphy once won a tombstone off an undertaker in a bourre' game. Guy couldn't pay him, so he gave Murphy a tombstone made to order. It had Murphy's name, date of birth, and the epitaph Murphy selected for himself. Murphy put it on his front doorstep, where it sat for over 20 years. When he finally expired, his kids had the date of death carved into the stone, and as he requested, put it at the head of his grave. The epitaph reads: "This ain't bad, once you get used to it."

I would be remiss if I didn't mention here Loose Canon's book about the glory of Southern funerals. Too bad Huey went to see the Lord after LC's deadline. Post below your own stories of crazy Southern fambly funerals. Or even crazy Yankee funerals, if they have such things.

Today's Boycott

I'm not sure what I think of it. Here's what's going through my head.

1. I think the Latino activists will overreach with this. It's my impression that they have no idea what kind of backlash is building up. It will be very hard for them to overcome the widespread use of the Mexican flag in the first mass demonstrations. For many people, the meme that "these are foreigners who are demanding rights that they don't have" stuck then, and it will be hard to erase. I've been reading stories saying that some Latino leaders worry that the day will be a bust for them politically, because they are using up all their ammo early in the immigration reform process. Maybe so. But what I'm more concerned about/interested in is the backlash from conservatives and others who can't understand why the laws of the United States don't matter here.

2. Why don't the laws of the United States matter here, anyway? What does it say about our country that we cannot control our borders? Nothing good.

3. At the same time, it bothers me--a lot--that there is no small degree of outright racism present. Yes, the Aztlan loons are guilty of the same thing, but I wonder how many anti-immigrant hardliners have trouble seeing the illegals as human beings. On the other side, I hate it when pro-immigrant activists and others assume that any opposition to the amnesty plan can only come from racist motive.

4. One thing going mostly undiscussed in all this is the role illegal immigration is playing in holding down unskilled wages. There was a startling story in the LA Times last week detailing conflict between blacks and Latinos over illegal Mexican immigration. Blacks at this protest say that their unskilled labor jobs are disappearing and going to Latinos who work off the books; Latinos say blacks are just lazy. Ugliness all around--and I don't know who's more right. This issue stands to fracture all kinds of political alliances--grassroots Republicans from business Republicans, African-Americans and labor from mainstream and Hispanic Democrats.

5. Furthermore, I have a feeling that we in the mainstream media don't have a good handle on this aspect of the story, in part because we don't have to worry about losing our jobs to illegal immigrants. All we have to worry about is losing our gardeners and maids (I say "we," but I don't have a gardener, and the maid who comes once a week is American; the point is, the class hit hardest by illegal immigration is Not Our Own, Dear). Similarly, illegal immigrant workers aren't filling up rental houses in our neighborhoods, and bringing crime and disorder to previously calm and family-oriented neighborhoods.

6. I wonder how all the grassroots anti-immigrant folks would feel if they were showed how the low prices for consumer goods and services that they've come to expect as a constitutional right depend largely on the presence of the 11 million illegal immigrant workers they oppose? Would we American citizens be willing to pay higher consumer prices for the sake of closing the borders? I would, because I think all workers, whatever their ethnicity, should make a just wage. But I think I'm in the minority on that, at least on the Right.

Re: 'United 93'

To expand on my "Allahu akbar" comment from last night...I congratulate the filmmakers for not pulling any punches in disguising the fanatical religious motivation behind the hijackers' crimes. I was thinking this morning, though, that it must be excruciating for American Muslims to watch this film and to see their religion invoked for such stone-cold evil. I kept thinking how I would feel if I had seen Christian terrorists saying "Praise the Lord" and reciting prayers as they committed mass murder. I suspect some American Muslims will come out of the film feeling very defensive about their faith (if they see the film at all), but I would hope their reaction is to be outraged at how the jihadists profaned their religion. I would hope they would commit themselves to openly and unequivocally fighting Islamism in all its guises.

I was thinking this morning about the words "Allahu akbar," which of course mean "God is great" in Arabic. On the afternoon of 9/11, I was walking down Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, where I lived, and where there are a significant number of Muslims. An elderly Arab Muslim man wearing traditional Middle Eastern garb looked at the smoke still rising from the hole across the water and said, as I passed, "Allahu akbar." I froze, and stared at him, and wanted to slug him. But of course I didn't, and I wouldn't have--and it's a good thing too. I thought the old man was praising what had happened, but as an Arab Christian friend told me later that afternoon, "Allahu akbar" can be used in the way Westerners say "My God!"--as an expression of wonderment and bewilderment in the face of an inexplicable phenomenon.

This morning, I'm even more of the opinion that the real lesson of "United 93"--both the film and the actual flight--is how difficult it is to act in the fact of chaos. I remember that morning, rushing from my apartment on the Brooklyn waterfront across the Brooklyn Bridge toward the fires in lower Manhattan. Every step of the way I was in denial about what was happening in front of me. Halfway across the bridge, a man with a portable radio shouted to the crowd, "They've hit the Pentagon!" And I thought, "You jerk, quit scaring us with false rumors."

On the other side of the bridge, a colleague of mine from the New York Post told me not to go down there, that those buildings were going to fall. I told her don't be silly. Within a minute or so, down came the south tower. Headed back to home in Brooklyn, I thought, "Maybe I should bring Julie a croissant?" and stopped at a bakery in our neighborhood to bring her breakfast. Julie was frantic waiting for me to get home; because she couldn't get me on the cell, she feared I'd been killed. When I showed up with a croissant in a bag, she later said that the fact that I'd thought to do that was a sign that I was in some kind of shock. That I was desperately trying to hold on to some kind of normality, even though the world was falling apart.

All that came back while watching "United 93" last night. And I felt in my bones what an incredible thing it was for those passengers not only to understand what was happening to them, but to grasp the imperative to act. In many, perhaps most, ways, I think America is still in denial about what 9/11 really meant ... and therefore unable to act in our own best interests.

Pessimist that I am, I also agree more than I wish I did with Ron Rosenbaum, who writes:

I did not come away from watching "United 93" feeling optimistic about the triumph of the human spirit and the superior resilience of enlightenment values. Quite the opposite. I came away with a feeling that history has been hijacked by a cult of the undead, or the wannabe dead, suicidal mass murderers driven by theocratic savagery. That, if you want a metaphoric fable, we're all on Flight 93, we're all doomed to crash and burn; whatever we do, the bes t we can hope for is that the existential rewards of local acts of courage will help us hold on a little longer before the end of enlightenment civilization and the dawn of the dead.

"United 93"

Just got back from seeing it. Let's just say that if I never hear the words "Allahu akbar" again as long as I live, that'll be okay. Really, it will. More thoughts tomorrow morning, after I've sorted out all kinds of complicated emotions. I will say that it was a very well done film, though it did not strike me as inspirational in the least. Which is good: I don't think we need to be inspired by a 9/11 movie. The overwhelming feeling I took from the film was of how quickly reality -- "reality" -- can be shattered, and how difficult it is to accept what is happening, and to act on that information. In my small way, that was my experience on 9/11 too, and it haunts me to this day, how hard it is for the mind to accept what it doesn't want, or isn't prepared, to accept.

But again, more on this tomorrow.