Connexion
There is no such thing as cultural Christianity without Christians.
The famed atheist Richard Dawkins is now calling himself a “cultural Christian.” That he would like to claim the culture of Christianity for himself while rejecting its theological tenets is not surprising. What is surprising is his honesty.
In an interview with the British network LBC on Easter Sunday, the New Atheist and author of The God Delusion announced, “I find that I like to live in a culturally Christian country, even though I do not believe a single word of the Christian faith.” Calling himself a cultural Christian means he can appreciate Christmas carols and cathedrals without worshiping Christ, the evolutionary biologist said. While Dawkins is still “happy” to see the number of Christians in the West declining, he spoke concernedly about losing Christian parishes to the thousands of new Islamic mosques being built across Great Britain. He reasoned that this is because Christianity is a “fundamentally decent religion,” unlike that alternative; indeed, Dawkins called the substitution of any alternative religion for Christianity “truly dreadful.”
What Dawkins is describing is what American liberalism has been attempting to actualize for decades: beautiful churches and traditions, absent the beatific vision of Christ made known to man. Standing apart from all this striving is the very important question whether such a thing—religion without religious adherents, church without God—can even exist, or would make any sense if it did. The mosques taking over Europe indicate the answer: When Christ is marched out of the church, the cathedrals may remain standing, but other religions will march in.
The idea of a neutered Christianity is tantalizing to an ideology that makes equality its cornerstone. The liberal worldview cannot allow for Christianity as it is, claiming superiority over all other religions and worldly regimes, but if perhaps that troublesome part could be cut out, and the consequences of sin forgotten, the remains could be something beautiful and harmless, or so the thought experiment goes. This is more than mere idea: The mainline Protestant denominations in America have gone to great lengths to liberalize the American church, and quite successfully so. In most major cities, the grand historic parishes belonging to the Episcopalian, Methodist, Presbyterian (PCUSA), and Unitarian denominations fly the rainbow flag to signal that “all are welcome,” even people their churches once excommunicated for living in unrepentant sin.
The doctrines of Christianity have been purged to fit the new sexual mores of our day. The PCUSA has been ordaining female pastors for nearly 70 years, in direct contradiction of the holy scriptures it claims to represent, for the sake of obedience to the god of gender equality. But it is the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Episcopalian in denomination, that demonstrates the greatest zeal. The church lists among its core values a commitment to “God’s gift of self-determination and democratic ideals.”
Strange: Neutered Christianity does not look much like Christianity at all. In fact, its shape is much more like some new religion, with acolytes stumbling over themselves to demonstrate their commitment to the solemn new doctrines ranging from sexual libertinism to that wonderful catch-all, “democratic ideals.” The high holy days of the old church have been smothered over by those of the new church: If Eastertide and Transgender Day of Visibility fall on the same day, the Christian holiday must submit to the sexual. The only possible consequence of taking Christ out of the church is that new gods will come to fill the void. Humans are by their nature religious.
Dawkins is right to recognize that it is better to belong to a Christian nation than to any other sort of nation. Indeed, much of his own worldview, whether or not he knows it, is borrowed from Christendom. It is not just cultural edifices like hymns and parishes, but the very systems of science Dawkins employs that were built by Christians, not to mention our legal and judicial heritage. These are not doctrines of the church, but they are the fruits of a people that once sought to live in accordance with nature and nature’s God. Where Dawkins goes wrong is in imagining he can remove Christ and still have the effects of Christianity. The faithful have left the mainline denominations already, and their buildings have been blasphemously desecrated; as they continue to be chased from the public square (Christianity is now apparently synonymous with white ethno-nationalism, the worst of all bogeymen), so too will Christian virtue. More violent crime, theft, drug use, suicide, broken families, and other social ills are downstream of this change, as Dawkins himself seems to be subconsciously aware.
The UK, like America, was once a Christian nation, but it will not remain so without Christians. Beauty, it turns out, cannot be found apart from holiness. The dampness in our eyes at “Ah, Holy Jesus” is not caused by meditating on suffering in the abstract, but on the very particular suffering of a very particular man. Absent that man, the whole thing is meaningless.
Dawkins himself has long rejected any claims to religious neutrality, frequently mocking Christians. In The God Delusion, he argued against all forms of religion as dangerous, divisive, and just plain illogical. At a 2012 rally of some 20,000 atheists and agnostics in Washington, DC, Dawkins derided Christians who believe in Christ’s real presence at the communion table. “Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated, and need to be challenged—and if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt,” he told a cheering crowd on the National Mall. Moments later he added, “Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!”
Having actively persecuted the church, Dawkins finds he is sad to see it go. We cannot pretend this is anyone’s fault but his own, and that of his compatriots who have crusaded against religion as the root of all social ills. Nevertheless, some of the church’s greatest apologists have come from its worst former persecutors. May the same be true of Dawkins.
The post Richard Dawkins’s ‘Cultural Christianity’ Is Thin Gruel appeared first on The American Conservative.
The only way to ensure permanent peace is to convince all major groups that their success requires mutual respect and cooperation. It is a lesson that Americans could ponder.
A quarter century has passed since Kosovo broke away from Serbia after a brief but bitter civil war. NATO abandoned its defensive mission and intervened “out-of-area” to oust the Serbian military and later force Kosovo’s independence. The new nation is very different than the once disputed and battered territory.
Nevertheless, the scars of war were evident on my recent visit. Kosovo’s losses, though less than in some other conflicts, such as Ukraine, were still painful. Some 13,000 people died and more than a million people were displaced. Kosovars must address the ethnic and religious divisions which remain and continue to hamper their advance. Helping light the way is the group Hardwired Global, which works around the world to break down barriers between communities and peoples.
Although the war is long over, Pristina and Belgrade remain at odds politically. The latter refuses to recognize Kosovo’s secession. Nearly half of the world’s governments, including five members of the European Union, also reject Kosovo’s statehood. Most consequential is Russia’s refusal to allow Pristina to join the United Nations. This gives Moscow continuing influence in Serbia, unsettling the European Union as war rages in Ukraine.
Moreover, deep divisions remain within Kosovo. Belgrade’s defeat led to violence against the once dominant ethnic Serb population and flight of many to Serbia. The remaining ethnic Serbs are concentrated in Kosovo’s north, adjoining Serbia, and they continue to resist Pristina’s authority. This has led to violence between ethnic Serbs and Albanians, and military posturing by both Belgrade and NATO, which retains an occupation force in Kosovo. While no one expects hostilities to erupt, the specter of further violence has increased regional tensions.
Kosovo cannot escape its history. Memorials to dead heroes abound. Politics long was dominated by former insurgents. Even today the country is rated as only “partly free” by Freedom House. Some of the victors participated in criminal networks, causing Europeans to call Kosovo a “black hole.” Although this problem has eased, the economy remains weak despite substantial outside aid and investment.
Children have no direct memory of the war but live with the war’s reality. I visited a school named after a graduate who died fighting as a member of the Kosovo Liberation Army. His bust stood outside and several paintings of him were hung inside. There are few moderating counterpoints to promote reconciliation among former enemies.
Kosovo was historically home to moderate Islam, but Kosovars with whom I talked worry about growing fundamentalism. One complained that “Islamic radicalism is growing among the young and was promoted from outside.” Another called the situation “very dangerous.” He cited the malign role of Turkey, which he believed had superseded Saudi Arabia in promoting extremism. Both governments have constructed mosques and supported imams.
A third Kosovar believed his country had made “space available for Islamic radicalism,” and that “Kosovo gets into trouble when it flirts with Islamists.” According to Kosovo Online: “An increasing number of Albanians in Kosovo believe that political Islam is the only solution to the accumulated world problems. Data from recent research indicate that in the past 25 years, dozens of young Albanians from Kosovo have been educated in religious schools in the Middle East. Many of these schools promote radical Islam, and some of their followers have been convicted in Kosovo for promoting terrorism.”
Indeed, Kosovo may be Europe’s most worrisome flashpoint outside of the continent’s borders with Russia. The lack of normalization of relations between Pristina and Belgrade makes it difficult to bring either into the European Union. Efforts to fully integrate the Balkans into the larger continental order remain stalled.
Into this world has stepped Tina Ramirez, founder of Hardwired International. A former congressional staffer and political candidate, she has spent years fighting against religious persecution in other nations. I have traveled with her to South Sudan, Kurdistan, and most recently Kosovo. There are many good organizations which stand up for the oppressed, some of which I have also accompanied overseas. Hardwired, however, is unique with its focus on education to combat intolerance, hatred, and all manner of “isms.”
Hardwired noted that Kosovo’s history has left “a fractured society with limited prospects for social and economic development.” One common strategy is to isolate communities, which often lessens current tensions but fails to mitigate long-term hostilities. Alternatively, in Kosovo, warned Hardwired, “imposed secularism has only increased tensions, particularly among conservative religious communities.” Such efforts inadvertently reinforce the message of extremists.
In contrast, Hardwired confronts contending beliefs head-on, offering respect while encouraging not just toleration, but understanding and cooperation. The focus is the classroom, and the process begins with teachers. I watched adults of varying beliefs and from diverse communities discovering, first, the possibility, and second, the necessity of working together despite diverse beliefs.
The process usually begins with religious minorities recognizing the importance of supporting one another. Members of religious majorities also come to realize the moral worth of those who believe differently, and the importance of treating them as equals. It is impossible to reach everyone, of course, but I was struck on my visit to Kosovo with the number of teachers and trainers who talked about how Hardwired’s curriculum helped transform their personal thinking.
One told me that she changed her mind and came to understand “why I should respect” other believers. “Now I am open to learn about them.” Indeed, she added, “we need to cooperate with one another. Religion doesn’t matter.” Another teacher spoke of his students, who learned to be “respectful of people of other religions, races, and other things.”
Such stories were oft-repeated. Most impressive were the admittedly skeptical who came to embrace the Hardwired training program. The organization does not try to convert people to Christianity. The program is effective because it respects the beliefs of all and focuses on creating a safe environment for everyone. In such a world Christians and others are freer to talk about their faith. Hardwired does not attempt to suppress belief but instead seeks to increase communication and understanding among faiths. Its objective is to thereby ease religious and political conflict.
Kosovo is steadily increasing the number of teachers equipped to lead their students in lessons on the importance of respecting the lives and dignity as well as freedom of conscience of all. This in turn helps ease the mistrust and fear still evident among many children as well as adults. Teachers and students then hold events for their families and larger communities. In this way Hardwired seeks to transform the nation.
Obviously, there are few shortcuts to overcoming years of conflict and hatred. Students sometimes were skeptical, even hostile, at the start. Yet most eventually were moved by the training. The most powerful remedy to the divisions evident in Kosovo and elsewhere is to bring people together to confront their fears and hostilities. One of the teachers spoke of flashbacks from the war. He lost a cousin and his family was forced to move: “We suffered a lot. So the training affected us personally.” Another spoke of how the lessons forced him to decide “how I will implement diversity and pluralism in my own life.”
Of course, it isn’t enough to have a good message. People must listen to it. In this case students generally respond well. One teacher noted how “kids ask if they can do it again.” Other teachers noted how the program caused participants to break out of their cliques and work together and in groups. She asked Hardwired to do more: “We desire that the students have another challenge so they can expand themselves.” She saw a “mind change” in those who participated in the program.
Today, Hardwired operates mostly in ethnic Albanian areas, since it has established a cooperative relationship with local educational officials. Ramirez hopes to expand into ethnic Serbian areas. Students there also need to learn how to engage “the other.” Such training may be the best hope for eventual willingness of both communities to live together in not only peace, but also harmony.
Hardwired’s work obviously doesn’t negate the need for a political modus vivendi between Kosovo and Serbia looking toward the future rather than the past. Nevertheless, Hardwired’s training is helping to construct a foundation for political reconciliation. The only way to ensure permanent peace is to convince all major groups that their success requires mutual respect and cooperation. It is a lesson that Americans need to take to heart as well.
The post Why Care About Kosovo? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Why the jailed publisher’s extradition case should be everyone’s concern.
How much is a non-binding “assurance” worth from people who probably want to see you dead? This is the linchpin question as a British court deliberates on the Biden administration’s latest conniving to bring Julian Assange to America for his legal destruction.
Since Julian Assange was indicted in 2019 for 17 charges of violating the Espionage Act, the U.S. Justice Department has sought his extradition from Belmarsh, the supermax prison in Britain where he has spent almost five years. The fight against extradition is probably the last best chance for even a facade of due process for Assange.
On Tuesday, the British High Court announced that it had effectively accepted assurances from U.S. politicians to British politicians that the Assange case is non-political, but the British judges did recognize three potential grounds for appeal. That court gave the U.S. government three weeks to provide “satisfactory assurances” that “Assange is permitted to rely on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution… that he is afforded the same First Amendment protections as a United States citizen and that the death penalty is not imposed,” and that the U.S. court would not be prejudiced against him because he is a foreigner.
None of the British or American officials recognized the supreme irony of the court decision. Assange and Wikileaks exposed deceptions and depredations by many governments around the world. Yet his legal fate depends on whether the British government chooses to trust the U.S. government—regardless of the endless lies that Assange exposed.
Stella Assange, Julian’s wife, scoffed that the decision was “astounding”: “What the courts have done is to invite a political intervention from the United States, to send a letter saying, ‘It’s all okay.’” Amnesty International stated, “While the U.S. has allegedly assured the UK that it will not violate Assange’s rights, we know from past cases that such ‘guarantees’ are deeply flawed—and the diplomatic assurances so far in the Assange case are riddled with loopholes.”
If Assange is brought to the U.S., his fate will be settled in an Alexandria, Virginia federal courtroom notorious for stacking the deck against anyone who exposed government crimes or wrongful killings. Ask John Kiriakou—the former CIA agent and torture whistleblower who was convicted there and sentenced to 30 months in prison. Ask Daniel Hale—the whistleblower who exposed the coverup of mass killings of innocent people by Obama’s drones, convicted and sentenced to prison for 45 months. Edward Snowden was charged in the same court but prudently omitted showing up for a kangaroo trial.
Assange’s fate threatens to be a bellwether for the destruction of journalists who vex officialdom. David Davis, a Conservative member of Parliament, warned, “The successful extradition of Julian Assange would effectively criminalize investigative journalism as espionage. It would set a legal precedent allowing the prosecution of anyone who breaks the duty of silence on classified American information and state sponsored crime.” Jodie Ginsberg, chief of the Committee to Protect Journalists, warned that Assange’s prosecution “would have disastrous implications for press freedom. It is time that the U.S. Justice Department put an end to all these court proceedings and dropped its dogged pursuit of the WikiLeaks founder.”
The U.S. government has been vilifying Assange ever since he and Wikileaks commenced revealing that thousands of innocent Iraqis and Afghanis were killed by the U.S. military. Vice President Joe Biden denounced Assange in 2010 as a “high-tech terrorist.” But even Biden admitted at that time: “I don’t think there’s any substantive damage” from the Wikileaks revelations. “Look, some of the cables that are coming out here and around the world are embarrassing,” he said.
Federal agencies also never proved that any of the information that Assange and Wikileaks released was false. At the court martial of former Army Corporal Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, who leaked the documents, prosecutors failed to show that any information Wikileaks disclosed had led to the death of a single person in Afghanistan or Iraq. That conclusion was re-confirmed by a 2017 investigation by PolitiFact. But Assange was guilty of violating the U.S. government’s divine right to blindfold the American people.
The fact that Assange disclosed classified documents is sufficient to seal his legal doom—at least according to how the game is played in federal courts. After Britain arrested Assange on behalf of the U.S. government in 2019, Sen. Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, whooped that Assange “is our property and we can get the facts and the truth from him.” But Manchin had no recommendations on how Americans can “get the facts and the truth” from the federal government. Federal agencies are creating trillions of pages of new “classified” secrets each year.
Ironically, while howling for Assange’s scalp, the Biden White House purportedly launched a “new war on secrecy” and is especially concerned about “potentially illegal [government] activities that have been shielded from the public for decades,” POLITICO reported in late 2022. A Biden administration official, speaking anonymously, declared that it is in the “nation’s best interest to be as transparent as possible with the American public.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, groused, “We spend $18 billion protecting the classification system and only about $102 million … on declassification efforts… That ratio feels off in a democracy.” But inside the Beltway, rigging the game 176-to-1 is “close enough for government work” for transparency. Thus far, Biden’s “war on secrecy” has apparently not gone beyond self-serving White House statements.
Perhaps the most important testimony for Assange dribbled out during a sometimes scatter-brained interview last October conducted by Special Counsel Robert Hur. As Hur was pressing President Biden about the stashes of confidential documents discovered illicitly stored in his garage, his den, his think tank, his office, etc., Biden declared, “We over-classify everything…. And 99.9 percent of it has nothing to do with anything I couldn’t pick up and read out loud to the public.” Special Counsel Hur deigned not to file charges against Biden—even though his violations of federal law had plenty of similarities to the conduct that spurred 40 felony charges against former President Donald Trump. The bizarre dichotomy in the Biden and Trump cases is showcasing the arbitrariness and absurdities of federal classification policy.
Another key to the Assange case is whether he is “permitted to rely on the First Amendment,” as the British judges wrote. Assange can’t rely on the First Amendment when telling the truth is the only war crime now recognized by the U.S. government. Defendants on espionage act cases routinely face so many piled-on court charges that they plea bargain, muzzling themselves as the price for not being locked up forever.
There are lessons from an early American landmark court case that could help resolve the Assange case. In 1735, John Peter Zenger was charged with seditious libel for an article he published on the Royal Governor of New York. Zenger’s criticism was accurate but that was irrelevant. In Britain and its colonies, truth was no defense against seditious libel; thus, any criticism of the government risked personal destruction. But a jury of New Yorkers heroically refused to convict Zenger, thereby revolutionizing both freedom of speech and the relation of citizens to government.
Could a similar legal standard be used to end persecution of anyone who publicly reveals official documents that never should have been classified? Instead of rubberstamp convictions, the government should be obliged to prove that a disclosure harmed the public interest or endangered the nation. That would also undermine the perverse incentive that perpetually propels overclassification. Unfortunately, it would not be possible to get the same positive impact simply by relying on jury trials. Since that federal court is inside the Beltway, the jury pool would be overstocked with people who work for the feds and/or believe everything they hear on National Public Radio. Washington jurors are prone to behave like Soviet mobs in the 1930s who howled for death sentences for anyone the Communist Party accused of being a “wrecker.”
Almost all the media coverage of the Assange case is failing to credit him for revealing how blindfolding citizens defines down democracy. Self-government is a sham if citizens are prohibited from knowing what elected officials are doing in their name. Politicians and Washington’s “best and brightest” have long been accustomed to covertly and recklessly intervening around the world with none of the usual checks and balances of democracy. But there is never a penalty for officialdom deceiving the public they claim to serve.
Biden’s Justice Department and Assange’s lawyers have reportedly discussed a possible plea deal that would drop the most serious charges against him. Fair play would be satisfied if Assange pleads guilty to lese majeste—embarrassing the government by exposing its follies, frauds, and crimes. I still believe that Assange deserves a presidential Medal of Freedom, as I recommended in USA Today in 2018.
But that would never satisfy people like Hillary Clinton, who joked about seeing Assange dead, or former CIA chief Mike Pompeo, who plotted on kidnapping and killing Assange. Hell-raisers like Assange are necessary to prevent America from becoming an Impunity Democracy in which government officials pay no price for their abuses.
The next hearing in the Assange case will be May 20 in London, a few weeks after the annual World Press Freedom Day. Biden marked that day last year by proclaiming, “Courageous journalists around the world have shown time and again that they will not be silenced or intimidated. The United States sees them and stands with them.” Except, of course, for any courageous journalist that Biden seeks to destroy.
The post Convicting Julian Assange Would Mean the End of Free Speech appeared first on The American Conservative.
Milei has made strides toward pushing back the left—but is his time running out?
On December 10, 2023, Javier Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist, was sworn in as president of Argentina.
Milei, best known for the hair that he claims is combed by Adam’s Smith invisible hand and an eccentric and irascible demeanor, promised to end the country’s economic woes—prevalent in the last 80 years but heightened in the last couple of decades—by launching a full-blown libertarian economic program of privatization, deregulation, and tight monetary policy. On the way, he would rid the country of the unholy marriage between socialism and wokeism that has assaulted Argentine institutions over the last 20 years.
After 100 days in power, has “the wig,” as he is known, laid the foundations for a libertarian populist revolt, or is his project showing early signs of foundering?
Milei is a culture warrior, which is why, despite being a radical libertarian, he has rallied conservatives and nationalists behind his agenda. But make no mistake: Most Argentines voted for him hoping he would fix the economic mess the country has been in since the early 2000s.
On the macroeconomic side, some of the measures are working. Monthly inflation fell in both January and February, after reaching its highest point in decades in December.
Milei promised to achieve a budget surplus (before interest payments) of 2 percent this year, after last year’s 3 percent deficit. So far, so good: The first two months of the year brought surpluses, the first in more than a decade.
Moreover, Argentina has an exchange control. Milei has not eliminated it yet, seeking to reduce the gap between the official and black market exchange rates (it now sits at around 20 percent) and improve the macroeconomic output of the country before eliminating it. Foreign reserves have increased by over $7 billion and the country-risk index has dropped significantly.
But this all has come at a cost.
Milei reduced energy and transport subsidies drastically. He also cut down on transfers to provinces. And, even though he has been raising spending on retirement pensions, he has done so by less than inflation, which means that, in real terms, he has also cut down spending.
In the first handful of days in his government, he devalued the peso by over 50 percent, causing inflation to skyrocket.
This has of course worsened the situation for Argentines, at least in the short term. Fifty percent of the country is in poverty and the economy is set to shrink by 4 percent in 2024.
Milei has been clear since day one that things in Argentina had to get worse before they got better; so far, his approval ratings are still relatively high, sitting close to 50 percent. He has achieved this because most Argentines believe the “caste”—the left-wing elites of the country—are to blame for the economic woes.
How long will Milei’s popularity last? That remains to be seen.
One of Milei’s key problems is that he doesn’t have enough parliamentary support for some of the most radical proposals in his agenda, such as labor reform and some deregulation policies. In fact, his party only holds seven seats in the Senate (which has 72 senators), and 41 representatives (which has 257), hardly enough to pass any kind of legislation.
He depends on PRO, the party of former president Mauricio Macri, some smaller parties that hold some seats in the House, and some breakaway members of opposition parties to pass legislation, which has proven difficult in his first 100 days in government.
In less than two years, Argentina has midterm elections, renewing parts of both houses of Congress. If Milei’s plan to stabilize the country’s economy has not worked by then, he may suffer a defeat that will end up derailing the rest of his term.
In fact, Milei’s lack of legislative support has not allowed him to take advantage of his popularity to pass essential elements of his agenda.
His first 100 days of government have been marked by two main measures: the Omnibus Law and the DNU.
Milei sent to Congress an all-encompassing bill with 664 articles that covered everything from fishing permits and privatization of state companies to shutting down the National Theatre Institute and reforming the pension system. This gave the opposition, and even some of his supporters, enough reason to pick the law apart, until Milei eventually withdrew it. He will likely try to pass it as individual laws, slowing down the process of reform.
Milei’s DNU (Decreto de Necesidad y Urgencia, Decree of Necessity and Urgency in English) was passed in December and was almost as all-encompassing as the law above. It covered labor market regulations, increasing interest on credit card debt, and reforming pharmaceutical companies.
Being a presidential decree, it technically does not need congressional approval. However, if both houses of Congress vote against the measure, they can strike it down. The Senate already voted against Milei’s decree, but until the House follows—and it is unclear whether it will, as Milei might reform the decree to garner some support—the decree remains on its feet.
Labor reform is key to Milei’s success. After the state bureaucracy built by the Peronist left, the trade unions are perhaps the most significant element of the “caste” Milei seeks to tear down. Mauricio Macri, today one of Milei’s most important allies, was president between 2015 and 2019 and tried to enact some of the same reforms; he was derailed by both the Argentine congress and the all-powerful labor unions that constantly called for strikes against Macri and to close main roads of the country.
Unions in Argentina are closer to a mafia than to organizations built to defend worker’s rights. For example, the truckers’ union has had the same president, Hugo Moyano, for 36 years. His eldest son is the vice president, while a daughter and a son are part of the work. Another son used to run a union for toll workers before becoming a congressman. The family has owned some of the most important football clubs in the country and has a political party close to the Justicialista Party, the traditional Peronist party in Argentina.
This family, allied with the traditional left of the country, is able to freeze the transport of food and oil in the blink of an eye, as they did under Macri.
Milei, so far, does not seem intimidated. He has shown a very un-libertarian impulse to wield state power to achieve his political ends—and this is what scares the left and makes the populist right stand by his side.
Milei’s long-term goal is dismantling most of the Argentine state. Make no mistake, he sees himself as an Argentine Reagan, tasked with becoming a libertarian hero. Many of his economic formulas seem to come out of the IMF rulebook, and he believes in international free trade with passion. Without the antics, Milei might seem like a product of an American think tank.
But what makes him different is his muscular use of state power. Milei is not afraid to wield public power—whether with far-ranging decrees or by using legitimate force to stop protests that threaten the stability of the state and his reforms—to achieve his political goals.
This has been particularly clear with unions: Milei tried to pass legislation to make union affiliation voluntary (it is currently compulsory and automatic) and also wants to allow companies to fire workers who take part in street blockades during protests. However, both are still frozen in the courts with all his labor reform until the Supreme Court decides on the matter.
Similarly, he has suspended all government publicity in media for a year, which was the main source of income for many privately-owned media outlets that served as parasitic propaganda entities on behalf of the government.
For years, Peronism enlarged the number and size of organizations that depended on the state through government funds or beneficial regulations. These organizations entered into a parasitic relationship with the “caste.” Milei has started eliminating these privileges. Lawyers are now not needed in some fast-track divorce procedures, which used to be an easy source of income. Artists relied on government funds to produce works that no one saw, and Milei gutted them. Fishermen and sugar producers relied on regulations, subsidies, and tariffs to sell their products, and unions depended on the automatic enrollment and payment of dues of their members to continue accumulating power.
Moreover, even though he is playing it smart (for example, by delaying the elimination of the exchange control or discussions on the dollarization of the economy), he is riding his popularity to enact the strongest, most painful reforms he needs to pass.
He does face a big challenge: If Congress stops his decree and does not pass his reforms (or they are stopped by the courts), Milei may run out of time. The Argentine people are becoming poorer by the day and their patience might not be great enough to wait until he can strike a deal in Congress or to see if he wins a congressional majority at the midterm elections.
He has floated the idea of holding a referendum to pass his reforms. Even if it is a non-binding consult, it might put enough pressure on some congress members to accept part of his reforms, and he seems popular enough to win such a referendum.
Also, his goal of maintaining a fiscal surplus might prove to be harder than expected. The recession is affecting tax revenues, and savings on energy subsidies were due to deferrals, not a budget reduction.
Milei has another front of opposition: provincial governors. None of them are members of his party, and many rely on generous discretional transfers from the central government, which Milei has reduced dramatically. Governors hold a significant level of power within their parties, meaning they can influence members of Congress from their parties to not negotiate with Milei and also continue challenging his agenda in the courts.
The last major challenge he faces comes from within: Milei’s banner is the economy, but his brand also includes the fact that he is a culture warrior, which is why he was able to garner support from conservatives and nationalists despite his defense of gay marriage and drug legalization in the past.
He quickly delivered by closing the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism, which was widely considered a do-nothing organ that existed simply to keep members of the ruling party as employees and fund left-wing propaganda. Milei also banned “inclusive” language and any reference to “gender perspective” in government documents and eliminated the Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity.
Nevertheless, these were mostly symbolic measures. Milei has not been shy to use state power to cut relations with its parasitic entities and eventually reduce its size. On the socio-cultural side, he seems to do the same: eliminate, cut down, reduce. But if Milei wants to fight the culture war and enact a long-term change, it seems that negative movements, focused on reduction and elimination might not be enough.
If he fails at his task of reforming the Argentine economy, his presidency will end up feeling like a fever dream. And to succeed, he might have to let his populist impulses overtake his libertarian mind.
The post One Hundred Days of Libertarian Populism in Argentina appeared first on The American Conservative.
His Majesty’s Government is bent on destroying Britain’s oldest and dearest patrimony.
I remember when British people used to say things like “They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong,” or “They can’t do that; it’s against the law.” George Orwell noted in 1941 that a vague belief in law being above power, expressed in such sentiments, was part of the English character. We also used to say that an Englishman’s home was his castle.
But night after night, local TV news bulletins show police in body armor with special battering rams, smashing down the door of some alleged drug dealer’s home. And we are expected and intended to approve, even though these events, plainly done for show, have less than no effect on the vast levels of drug abuse in our society. In fact, although we have had a Bill of Rights in England since 1689, on which much of the American Bill of Rights is based (including, amazingly, the right to bear arms), we are very poorly protected from the state if it wishes to start pushing us around.
Two recent cases in the London courts, one awaiting judgment and the other perhaps awaiting appeal, would be engaging the attention of the Voltaire of our age if we had one.
But we do not. Radicals, in Britain at least, have given up concerning themselves about annoying matters of free speech or the abuse of power. I think this is because those radicals, finally in charge, are actually rather enjoying the sweets of government—the freedom to start wars, and the freedom to squash the liberties of others.
The two cases are those of Julian Assange, an Australian whose Wikileaks organization published American secrets after Chelsea Manning leaked them; and Graham Phillips, an unloveable British video blogger whose reports from Ukraine have, to put it mildly, not glorified the Ukrainian side in the current war in that country.
Here I must give thanks for the Internet, which allows the curious reader to examine the details of these two men’s actions for themselves. There are many such details, and I do not ask anyone to admire either man. I have disagreed with Assange rather fiercely over the drug issue. I don’t much like Phillips’s behavior, especially towards prisoners of war captured by the Russians. But, as the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter once rightly said, “The safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people.”
I won’t even go very deeply into the argument about what Assange published except to say that his supporters fiercely rebut the main (and most widely believed) claim against him—that he endangered Americans by his actions. They say he took careful precautions against doing so, and that no evidence of such harm has ever been produced. I’d add that his revelations about the shocking behavior of American Apache helicopter crews over Baghdad in July 2007 are by any standards an illustration of what journalism truly is and what it is most profoundly for—revealing the concealed truth about the actions of the state, and so increasing the amount of justice in the universe.
The U.S. government wants Assange in its hands, even though, if he were a U.S. citizen, he would (I believe) be protected by the First Amendment. It wants to try him under the oppressive Espionage Act of 1917, which allows no public interest defense. The same rather disreputable piece of legislation was used against Daniel Ellsberg after his 1970s leaking of the Pentagon Papers. This is now pretty universally believed to have been a noble and correct act, and Ellsberg, before his recent death, was a vocal supporter of Julian Assange.
There is no question that this is a political case. It has been openly discussed by the former CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who was highly critical of Assange. If any British government official of similar rank had intervened in this matter in the same way, I doubt that our courts would have allowed the case to proceed. The Extradition Treaty between Britain and the U.S. specifically and explicitly bans political extradition.
Yet the London courts and the British government have so far insisted that Assange (languishing now for years in a UK maximum security prison as if he were a terror suspect) should be sent to America. It is quite astonishing how few British journalists, whose own freedom seems to me to be gravely threatened by these proceedings, have been prepared to back Assange. There is a kind of acceptance of this mighty crushing action, unworthy of an allegedly free country, let alone two allegedly free countries.
Even fewer voices have been raised for Phillips, the only purely British citizen (that is to say, without any other nationality) ever to have been sanctioned by His Majesty’s Government under ferocious recent laws granting ministers arbitrary powers to punish individuals without due process. Generally, such sanctions are levied against governors of Siberian provinces of Russia or Syrian army officers who will never set foot in England and do not need to be worried about them. They have been a way for Britain to look as if it is doing something in various officially noble causes when it is not really. But Phillips, a former minor civil servant, is badly hurt by this treatment.
The expression “Kafkaesque” is used pretty widely and lightly in our language. When we employ it, we do not really think that an individual is being treated remotely as badly as Josef K. was in “The Trial.” Yet Phillips is genuinely trapped in a legal matter in which he can do no right, and from which there is no obvious escape. He owns a modest house in North London and expects one day to return to his homeland. These sanctions, imposed by decree rather than by any court, make him a prisoner of the state. He cannot receive payment for work. Nor can he pay anyone for any services. So he is forced to break the law. He cannot, for example, pay the property taxes on his house to his local town hall. Non-payment is of course against the law. Some time ago, I had to intervene to explain this to that town hall, who might otherwise have taken stern action against him, but who had the humanity to see he was trapped and to act accordingly.
Phillips has been repeatedly told that he could apply for a special license from His Majesty’s Treasury, allowing him to live some of his life. He understandably resisted this, believing that to do so would be to accept a punishment unjustly imposed on him. Now that he has sought to apply for such a license, he has found that it has not in fact helped him very much. His British bank still does not wish to deal with him, for instance. He cannot make it do so. The charge against him is so strange that I find it almost incredible. Phillips is being sanctioned because he is “a video blogger who has produced and published media content that supports and promotes actions and policies which destabilize Ukraine and undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty, or independence of Ukraine.”
Two thoughts occur to me. One is that Ukraine must be weaker than we thought if the insignificant video blogs of this little-known person threaten its territorial integrity, sovereignty, stability or independence. The other is that my own newspaper and magazine writing, and my broadcast debate contributions, critical of Ukraine and of British policy towards it, could, under a slightly dimmer government than Britain now possesses, be cited against me in the same way. Phillips, who could barely get the London Foreign Office to respond to his letters about his treatment, took this matter to the High Court in London as a civil matter, thanks to the pro bono support of a London barrister called Joshua Hitchens (to whom I am not related). Joshua Hitchens fought the case hard, on the grounds of free speech, and lost. He has since sought permission to appeal.
In initially refusing him, the High Court said that the arbitrary punishment of Phillips was an intentional outcome of UK sanctions law. It noted that “it is clear that Parliament intended that sanctions could be imposed in response to the exercise of rights of speech and expression.”
These are bad times for freedom of speech in the country that gave birth to it, and worse times for those who thought that the country, or at least a reasonable number of journalists, would rise in revolt against the extinction of its liberty. It turns out that they can do that here—that they can run you in if you haven’t done anything, and nobody but a few eccentrics will care.
The post Assange, Phillips, and the End of Rights appeared first on The American Conservative.
No other politician—let alone the current president—has shown the same pragmatic concern for the little guy.
I don’t really have anything in common with Donald Trump. I’m certain that he and I have not endured the same struggles, or have the same exact family values, or share every civil conviction. To be honest, I find aspects of his personality obnoxious and his frequent divisiveness tactless at times. I’ve also voted for him twice.
Thinking back on why I’ve voted for him, none of the reasons have much to do with the man himself. Trump turned the Republican party’s gaze towards the working class—towards people like me. Appealing to this sector of American society is tough. Most of us have been jaded by politics for years; establishment Republicans have been more obsessed with globalist agendas and catering to big business while Democrats have pandered to the highly educated and incited cultural discord. Trump, despite his many faults, lifted the rug to prove to the rest of his party that there are indeed millions of us scampering around down under it—many of us politically homeless and some of us completely disengaged from American politics altogether.
There were a few things Trump did other than acknowledge our existence that earned our trust. His almost comical outsider status, for one thing, worked in his favor. I almost viewed him as a kind of “Carnie” candidate—a political obscurity that you had to see to believe. Despite this, I was also convinced that he was bullheaded enough to pull off at least some of what he was promising to do.
Working in manufacturing at the time in 2016, I often worried about the stability of my future in this almost fossilized American industry. Trump’s talk of getting tough on China appealed to me. Growing up in the Midwest, Ohio specifically, I can drive to several old manufacturing towns nearby that are lopsided husks of what they used to be. A stark reminder of the skin America shed when our politicians and corporations decided that sacrificing the socioeconomic security of millions of Americans was worth the paper-thin bottom lines and burgeoning GDP as a result of outsourcing American manufacturing.
I am not completely averse to the Reagan-era, libertarian economic reflexes that have guided much of the Republican party’s fiscal policy for decades. I think there is real power in the markets these policies make. But I also see how retiring America’s manufacturing backbone here at home only to resurrect it more cheaply overseas has left my neighboring communities. It left the promise of the American dream in shambles for many in rural and suburban America, and for what? Cooler, cheaper widgets? Trump promised to scrape some of the dream back for the working class by renegotiating trade agreements, imposing tariffs, and championing domestic manufacturing growth.
He also promised to help achieve energy independence. Not only would this help the pocketbooks of Americans at the pump, but it would also be a boon to America’s industrial capabilities. Working to counter our dependence on China while also giving America access to cheaper, domestic energy was like unkinking a hose. For many of us in the working class, we saw the reality of fossil fuel use as inevitable—at least for now. Whether it was coming from overseas or being produced at home, we weren’t going to decrease our demand for fossil-fuel based products any time soon.
Then there were Trump’s promises of national security. Everything from securing the border to increasing military spending. Leading up to 2016, ISIS was running rampant and terrorizing various parts of the Middle East. Not long after Trump took office, they disappeared. You no longer heard stories of ISIS campaigns where they seized various territories. Instead, we heard stories of our pursuit of these wolves. Until you didn’t. So much of this was possible because of our military leaders and forces being properly resourced and efficiently commissioned.
While the chaos at the border is more insane today than ever before, at least Trump was willing to acknowledge that it was insane. There is a lie that those seeking moral currency let themselves believe: that enforcing border security laws is inhumane and bigoted. As a Catholic and as an American, I believe we have a mandate to be a nation that welcomes immigrants into our fold. But I refuse to believe that an existence as a perpetual illegal alien is one of security and safety. I want these desperate souls to have the protections and safety nets that are made possible by entering our country legally. I also can’t let myself believe that consistently granting mass amnesty to illegal immigrants is wise either. We must have border security. We must have an orderly immigration system. The work Trump began on this could have eventually led to a more streamlined and safe immigration process. Instead, it fell apart.
What’s the unifying thread? How has this coastal elite billionaire found his way into the hearts of so many ordinary, working-class Americans
Pragmatism. Trump created a mandate for the Republican party to begin the work of fashioning itself into a party that is bullheaded, productive, and committed to ordinary people.
So, while I may not have much in common with Donald Trump, or think he’s much of a sweetheart, I do think he has allowed a much-needed shift to occur. This shift has spurred on new leaders like Senator J.D. Vance, Governor Ron DeSantis, and Senator Josh Hawley. But Trump is the man for now. He’s the one who made it all possible. He forced the Republicans take a meaningful look at an entire class of people who have been fatigued by political and civil malaise for decades. And in the face of a Biden–Trump rematch, I expect much of working class America to continue its shift toward the party that pulled the rug back in 2016, rather than the party that swept us under there decades ago.
The post Why This Electrician Is Still With Trump appeared first on The American Conservative.
Evangelicals withstood secularization better than the mainline denominations, but to endure in the new America they will have to change tactics.
Life in the Negative World, by Aaron Renn, Zondervan Reflective, 205 pages.
In February 2022, First Things published an article titled “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism.” Written by management consultant and author Aaron Renn, the piece argued for a new schema to describe the decline of Christianity in modern America, one depicting that decline in terms of status. Subscribing to orthodox evangelicalism in 2024 is low status. How did we get here?
Renn’s thesis in that article would become his new book, Life in the Negative World. In it, he fleshes out the “three worlds” of evangelical Christianity: the positive world, the neutral world, and the negative world. In the positive world, roughly from the 1960s to the early 1990s, being a Christian gave one prestige and non-Christians were viewed with suspicion. This era was followed by the neutral world, from around 1994 to 2014, when being a Christian no longer bestowed positive benefits but neither did it make one an outcast. The neutral world was followed by the negative world, the one in which we now live. In the negative world, the same faith that once made an American man great is his greatest stigma.
While Renn is not the first to argue that American Christians are at a disadvantage in recent years, he is one of the first to propose a timeline for how this change has occurred, laying out concrete incidences of how Christianity has been treated economically, socially, politically, and institutionally before and after each era of decline.
This change is especially notable when examining elite institutions, where the WASPs once ruled and where evangelicals today hold almost no influence. (Following sociologists, Renn defines evangelical churches as those that belong neither to mainline denominations nor to the black church.) Even in places where Christians are prevalent, such as socially conservative think tanks in Washington, D.C., evangelicals find themselves in the role of the junior partner while Catholics take the lead. As Renn writes, “This shift to the negative world poses a profound challenge to American evangelicals and their churches and institutions. It also helps to explain why there’s been so much turmoil and conflict within the evangelical world and even why some believers have ‘deconstructed’ their faith.”
Importantly, Renn calls the positive world “the peak of evangelical influence within U.S. political conservatism,” not necessarily the era when evangelical Christianity was healthiest. Like the postliberals, Renn recognizes that the midcentury consensus had begun to disintegrate before the 1960s. Renn does not say this moral decline was baked into the cake of the American political system from the beginning. Instead, he identifies a few proximate causes that accelerated the decline: the collapse of the WASP establishment of the 1950s, the 1960s social and sexual revolutions, the end of the Cold War and ensuing moral laxity, corporate consolidation, and digitization.
While the mainline Protestant denominations have been dying for decades, evangelical churches stayed relevant much longer, due to their ability to adapt to a changing landscape, Renn argues. A broad description of moral decay is not nearly so useful, then, as Renn’s closer look at how evangelical churches adapted to their waning influence while the mainline went the way of the rotary phone.
Within these adaptations were three primary strategies: seeker sensitivity, cultural engagement, and culture war. Renn mines each for its strengths and weaknesses but argues that they are unfit for the new negative world landscape. Seeker sensitives and cultural engagement types have to reckon with their dependence on the moving target of progressive approval, and culture warriors must also come to terms with the reality that the culture they hope to transform is not at all amenable to their efforts, even if conservatives are able to win elections (hardly a given).
Renn proposes a new approach, one much older than the 1980s: thinking like an explorer. Christianity is fundamentally unknown to most modern Americans, and the territory of being a minority is likewise unknown to most modern American Christians. Thus, evangelicals will need to venture into this unknown with both eyes open, studying the alien terrain and learning how they might, once again, adapt.
Renn has recommendations for this strategy of exploration at three levels: personal, institutional, and missional.
The personal level is simple: Become obedient to orthodox Christianity. Nothing less will equip evangelicals to stand firm in a world that is opposed to their existence. Evangelicals must also seek to become personally excellent; the anti-intellectual, anti-elite strain of Protestantism has only hurt Christians by precluding them from a seat at decision tables. “A lack of orientation toward leadership has meant evangelicals have effectively ceded leadership to those who don’t share their values,” Renn writes. Lastly, Christians must become personally antifragile, borrowing concepts from Nassim Taleb’s book of the same title about mitigating personal financial risk.
The institutional strategy is where Renn lays out some of his most interesting ideas. Christians must pursue institutional integrity, he says. This does not simply mean trustworthiness, but also structural integrity, the ability for institutions to “retain their shape when the pressures of the world bear down on them hard.” This requires a “long-term, intergenerational perspective,” a radical thought for evangelicals, whose churches rarely “stay effective for more than a generation or so.”
Aside from trustworthiness and competence, which should be a given at Christian institutions but unfortunately are not, Renn exhorts his readers to bolster their institutional strength by thinking like a minority group. Just as the early church in Rome did not view itself as responsible for the institutions of the Roman imperium, Christians living in the negative world today ought to direct their primary focus to teaching the core tenets of the faith and developing their cultural identity, which in turn strengthens their communal bonds. In other words, Christians should follow the behavior of other American minority groups and build their own counterculture. Renn advocates taking a page from American Catholicism: “Catholics built their own churches, their own schools, and their own universities. They held catechism classes for their youth and created their own social organizations like the Knights of Columbus. They long held to uniquely Catholic practices like abstaining from eating meat on Fridays, traditional practices that set them apart from the rest of the country. They had distinct visible symbols like rosaries and crucifixes.”
Importantly, Renn notes, American Catholics have also maintained an intellectual elite where American Protestants have not. For Renn, this is due to institutional strength, but he does not note that in many ways this has depended on the hierarchical nature of Catholicism, to which too many Protestants are allergic. Can evangelicals pursue institutional excellence while remaining evangelical? Recent history, at least, has found that elite types more often leave evangelicalism, either for high church Protestantism, Romanism, or Orthodoxy, rather than sticking around to change it.
Another challenge in creating this counterculture is a lack of physical real estate. Evangelicals in America today “exist almost entirely inside space owned by others—legally owned in many cases, but more importantly, socially and culturally owned.” Christians who hope to forge a strong minority should not limit their efforts to cultural influence and media platforms, Renn says, but must acquire physical real estate, too. Here again, Renn urges Christians to think like a minority, acquiring medium-sized businesses explicitly for the sake of employing their fellow Christians. Evangelicals might also consider implementing a Christian form of ESG, Renn suggests, as a way of credentialing businesses aligned with Christian objectives.
Missional influence, the third leg of Renn’s new strategy for evangelicals in the negative world, involves overcoming Christianity’s status problem. Because we no longer live in a world where Christianity is basically familiar, “conveying the truths of Christianity today…is more akin to the work of a cross-cultural missionary introducing the gospel for the first time to a foreign culture.” Renn advises Christians speak the truth about orthodoxy clearly (the seeker-sensitive bait-and-switch on controversial issues only fosters mistrust), build trustworthy enterprises, and create healthy communities attractive to unhealthy, atomized individuals.
“Never underestimate how attractive countercultural living can be to women stuck on the Tinder treadmill or to men who believe they are forever doomed to being an outcast and ‘incel,’” Renn quips.
As might be guessed from his popular newsletter and previous writings on Christian masculinity, Renn is at his strongest when diagnosing the problems of the modern evangelical sexual ethic. The church has failed in no small part because Christians have been barely better than the world, and sometimes no better at all, when it comes to issues like women initiating divorce, use of pornography, and articulating the differences between men and women. In the latter case especially, Christian leaders have accepted the feminist argument that men and women are essentially the same and are thus unable to provide any useful advice to young Christians struggling to find and keep a spouse. Young Christian women have accepted egalitarianism wholecloth, while men turn to “morally dubious online gurus” such as Andrew Tate. Some of the work of repairing this sexual economy will fall to pastors, but Renn is keen to emphasize the necessity of lay leaders, too, pushing back on the institutional laziness that can lead to burnt out pastors and disengaged churchgoers.
While Renn favors honest, transcendent teaching about the Biblical principle of male authority, he is not a patriarchist. To him, the idea of Christian patriarchy in 2024 is little more than historical roleplay that requires a woman’s willing participation to work, since men do not have legal patriarchal authority as they had in the Roman paterfamilias. Though Renn does not call patriarchy opposed to Christianity and avoids discussing male headship theology in detail, he does suggest that whatever scripture mandates about authority does not require patriarchy per se.
More importantly, he sees this “neopatriarchy” as an unhelpful tool for Christians living in the negative world. Neopatriarchy is “an attractive short term option,” he says, but one that “seeks a return to a world that no longer exists—and likely can’t coexist in any meaningful way in the contemporary American culture and legal environment.”
Renn’s positive solution is vague, perhaps unnecessarily so. He recognizes the need to cultivate productive Christian households as the backbone for several of his recommendations, yet the key voices advocating for this method and providing Christians with plenary tools and resources to do it have been some of the same neopatriarchy crowd he mocks. The Christian strongholds at Pastor Douglas Wilson’s church in Moscow, Idaho, and a similar, smaller group at New Christendom Press in Ogden, Utah, may not be successful exclusively because of their theology of Biblical headship, but undeniably it is a primary piece of the puzzle. These experiments have borne much fruit of precisely the kind Renn hopes to inspire. For example, the Moscow Christians have purchased much of their town’s main street real estate, creating both physical Christian strongholds and real cultural influence of the kind Renn describes (and for which Renn praises them by name).
In a recent Substack post, British commentator Mary Harrington contends that Christianity is unlikely to ever be high status again: “There is no way in the world to make going to church cool, and the most cringe thing of all is trying.” The only way to overcome the Christian status barrier, in her treatment, is to stop caring about status altogether and become actively anti-cool. This is not altogether different from the counterculture Renn advocates, one in which Christians consciously align themselves with an outgroup at the expense of secular elite status. Renn rightly recognizes that the outgroup can also confer its own status. In other words, living as an orthodox Christian has the power to be high status within a Christian counterculture regardless of the church’s secular status.
To be successful in converting this enclave status to real world influence would require evangelicals to set some barriers of exclusivity, too—something missing from Renn’s treatment and indeed from evangelical Christianity for the past several decades. In minority enclaves, including the Catholic church, admittance must be earned at some level: The blessing is given to all, but the mass is given only to those who have joined the church. This exclusivity is part of what makes the ingroup appealing to the outgroup. The power of a minority is dependent on this distinction, and the future of the evangelical church in America will require embracing it.
The post Exploring Christians as a Minority in America appeared first on The American Conservative.
Christian witness to the truth matters in every season, but especially among those we love.
Sensible people don’t bring up abortion at the Christmas dinner table—it doesn’t fit with the mood of the holiday. Yet the national slaughter of innocents has a way of itching at consciences, and some are more upfront than others about what itches them.
It doesn’t have to be the Obama-era archetype of the blue-haired cousin who decides to derail the day. Sometimes, it’s the otherwise normal teenager whose freshman sociology textbook has exposed him to a new world of “lenses” and “worldviews.” On another occasion, it’s the aging aunt who fondly recalls learning, in the novelty of early professional life, the meaning of the Equal Rights Amendment as she holds a sign advocating for its ratification. Other times still, it’s a grown man.
There’s a certain degree of ignorance involved in each of these scenarios, some of which are more embarrassing than others. It’s good to instruct the ignorant. Yet—this is where lifestyle gurus have a point—some people would rather be ignorant of the truth than know the truth. Were we perfectly rational creatures, every American could recognize that every preborn person demands protection in the law. Even when the day that recognizes legal protections for preborn Americans at the federal level comes, we will always encounter fellow citizens who think it acceptable, even righteous, to kill children in the womb.
If the topic comes up at the dinner table, start by thanking God, in your own words, for being alive and for having been spared from the evil of abortion. According to his will, you were born to parents who thought it best, amid possible encouragement to the contrary, that you grow and mature according to his design.
Your interlocutors, you may remind them, have never spoken to a victim of abortion.
This point, however obvious, is difficult to respond to. Those who have been tricked by the monied abortion industry to think of abortion as a prerequisite for the liberation of women will often redirect the conversation—to the extent that word is appropriate—to an argumentative assault. “Why do you even care?” they ask. “How does this affect you?”
Abortion laws affect all of us because every just law instructs its followers to know what is good and right. Unjust laws, though, are not laws at all. They don’t exist. Roe v. Wade, when it was in force from 1973 to 2022, attempted to convince the American people that the killing of preborn innocents was permitted. But, in fact, it was never permitted. Before, during, and after Roe, preborn Americans have always had the protection of law.
However, many Americans were convinced that Roe changed laws around abortion. With Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, abortion became something laudable, something that, in the words of Justice Kennedy, was all part of liberty’s “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
But this was all a lie. The 49-year deception of nationwide permissive abortion convinced a great many Americans that the law permitted a preborn child to be killed in the womb of his mother. As Hadley Arkes said in his reflection on the one-year anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health,
Roe not merely created a right to abortion; it changed the culture. It converted abortion from a thing to be abhorred, discouraged, and forbidden, into something approved, celebrated, and encouraged. The conservative justices in Dobbs did nothing to start undoing those moral lessons.
American culture, if anything because of the spiritual damage and psychological trauma inflicted on the nation after decades of Roe, is still largely formed by the deception of the Roe decision. As ballot initiatives across the country have proved, we do not live in a pro-life nation.
As more laws crop up on both the state and federal levels that recognize and protect the personhood of preborn Americans, the culture will slowly start to shift. To call this project an uphill battle would be an understatement: most culturally formative institutions either contribute to or profit from the abortion industry itself or corporations that fund the culture of death. This culture will continue to predominate so long as pro-life Americans are treated and think of themselves as second-class citizens.
During the Christmas season, it’s worth recalling that the miracle that is required for American law to recognize something as fundamental as preborn personhood is minor when compared to the miracle of the incarnation. The act of the logos taking on human flesh, God becoming man, is the mark of ultimate humility to which Americans owe constant gratitude. But because of our ignorance and wounded human nature, we know that this gratitude will be sporadic and irregular. To make up for those lapses, it’s worth bringing up at the dinner table.
The post Defending the Preborn at Christmas appeared first on The American Conservative.
The former American zone has turned dystopian, and now China is making moves.
This summer, hundreds of ships backed up at the Panama Canal, leading the Panama Canal Authority (ACP), a semi-independent organization whose board of directors is selected by various branches of the Panamanian government, to restrict travel in the critical global trade artery through which 40 percent of all U.S. container traffic travels annually. The culprit of this global commerce crisis, so the media narrative goes, was low water levels linked to El Niño and climate change. But talk to enough of the approximately 30,000 U.S. citizens living in Panama and you’ll hear mention of another factor: Panamanian corruption and incompetence.
Given Panama’s embarrassing history of financial crime, that should not be surprising. The country has twice been on the “gray list” of the Financial Action Task Force, an intergovernmental organization founded in 1989 to combat money laundering. In 2016 the “Panama Papers” leak revealed the country as a locus for money laundering and illicit finance. And in May of 2023, Canal Minister Aristides Royo requested the resignation of ACP board of directors member Jorge Gonzalez, provoking speculation regarding the latter’s corrupt relationship with a major Chinese state-owned enterprise doing business related to the canal.
“We built a thing called the Panama Canal,” Donald Trump told Tucker Carlson in an August interview. “We lost 35,000 people to the mosquito…. We sold it for one dollar. China now controls it. They actually control the Panama Canal.” The claim that China “owns” the canal is hyperbolic, but it’s true that Chinese companies have for years heavily invested in infrastructure-related contracts in and around the canal, as the Center for Strategic & International Studies explained in a 2021 report. “There’s five…Chinese state-owned enterprises along the Panama Canal,” commander of U.S. Southern Command General Laura Richardson warned in August. “What I worry about is their being able to use it for dual use. Not just civilian use, but flip it around and use it for military application.”
For the Americans who live in Panama, their frustration is not just about the geostrategic threat posed by China, though that is very real. It is about the loss of a way of life. The Panama Canal Zone, a 553 square mile area that for about seventy-five years was U.S. sovereign territory, was at one point home to 100,000 Americans. Thousands of U.S. citizens departed Panama prior to the handover of the territory to the Panamanian government on December 31, 1999, but many more remain, a curious and instructive vestige of a foreign policy focused on executing the Monroe Doctrine and ensuring American dominance in the hemisphere.
The best historical treatment of the construction of the Panama Canal remains David McCullough’s 1977 National Book Award–winning The Path Between the Seas. What was for the French an unmitigated disaster that cost 22,000 lives and almost three hundred million dollars, as well as bankrupting thousands of French investors, turned into one of America’s most impressive achievements. Teddy Roosevelt deserves credit for securing American control of the project, including the Bismarckian enabling of a Panamanian revolt against Colombia by way of gunboat diplomacy. But the canal’s success was predominantly the result of two ingenious Americans: self-educated chief engineer John Frank Stevens, who designed the canal’s brilliant lock system; and sanitation officer William C. Gorgas, who identified the mosquito as the preeminent threat to canal workers and took sweeping steps to defeat malaria and yellow fever on the isthmus.
The admittedly contentious Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty, signed in 1903, gave the United States authority to build and administer the PCZ and its defenses. Panama itself remained a U.S. protectorate until 1939. The PCZ, which forcibly depopulated about 40,000 unevenly compensated local inhabitants, was administered by an American governor appointed by the president. Hospitals, schools, and housing developments were built across the U.S.-governed territory, which was part military base, part suburban development. There were commissaries, cinemas, and even an overseas campus of Florida State University, established in 1957 at the request of the Department of Defense.
It was, in a sense, an American colony. It was “a small southern town transplanted into the middle of Central America,” according to Michael Donoghue, author of Borderland on the Isthmus: Race, Culture, and the Struggle for the Canal Zone. Zonians, as they were called, could enjoy social clubs, sports teams, and other fixtures of American life without ever learning to speak Spanish or even needing to leave the Zone—though plenty regularly did, to the benefit of the local economy, helping turn Panama City into the metropolis it is today.
This idyllic tropical paradise did not sit well with many Panamanians, however. They bristled at the wealth and privilege of their American neighbors and harbored grievances over the splitting of their country by a canal they viewed as rightly theirs. Demonstrations and riots occurred between 1958 and 1962, and in 1964 a student-led march on a high school in the PCZ snowballed into violent exchanges between Panamanian protestors and PCZ police and U.S. military units. Twenty-two Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers were killed. Lyndon Johnson in 1965 declared plans to renegotiate the 1903 treaty, though it was not until the Carter administration that the United States agreed to hand over the entire PCZ, a process that was completed in 1999. (A controversial amendment to Carter’s 1977 Panama Canal Treaty, named the DeConcini Reservation after Arizona senator Dennis DeConcini, stipulates that the United States retains the right to use military force if necessary to keep the canal open.)
The textbook story of the Panama Canal is one of American imperialism and Panamanian autonomy. Many Zonians offer a different perspective. Even after the 1964 riots, it remained easy for Panamanians to cross into the PCZ, which, for all its flaws, was a critical node in U.S. geostrategic policy and served as a beacon of American efficiency, law, and order. Unemployment was non-existent, crime was minimal, and if a PCZ resident was found with illegal narcotics, the entire family was sent home. When the Panamanians assumed control, many of the buildings in the former PCZ deteriorated or were simply abandoned. Gamboa, today a rainforest reserve but once a thriving community employing those focused on dredging the canal, is a bit dystopian, with many abandoned or destroyed American-made homes, churches, and even a movie theater. Crime, including in the former PCZ, has steadily increased.
The maintenance of U.S.-made infrastructure is noticeably delayed and haphazard in the former PCZ. Massive potholes dot the roads in communities such as Clayton and Albrook, former Zonian suburbs populated by a mixture of Panamanians, Americans, and other expats. Similarly, the ACP has a reputation for waiting until canal machinery breaks to do repairs, rather than preserving the proactive maintenance schedule that was in place during the American administration. The growth of Panama City has increased the demand of freshwater from lakes and tributaries feeding into the canal, which by extension affects water levels, but there seems to be little motivation by the Panamanian government or ACP to address that problem. Efforts to combat saltwater intrusion into the canal, meanwhile, are more band-aids than strategic solutions.
At the Miraflores Locks near the former Fort Clayton, now called Ciudad del Saber or “City of Knowledge,” visitors watch an IMAX movie narrated by Morgan Freeman that briefly touches on the American resourcefulness that made the canal a reality, before offering an extensive, not-so-subtle propagandistic presentation of Panamanian control of the canal. Jimmy Carter makes an appearance, praising the Panamanians for increasing the income of the canal fourfold, though that is a bit disingenuous given that, under U.S. control, the canal was mandated to only break even in order to finance its use and maintenance (any surplus revenue was returned to the federal government). Today, the canal is the largest contributor to Panama’s primarily service sector economy, which also includes tourism, logistics, container ports, flagship registry, and banking.
In contrast to recent reported controversies, there was no remotely comparable corruption during the U.S. administration of the canal. That is not to downplay the well-documented problems of U.S. rule. Beyond the tensions with the Panamanian people, there are embarrassing examples of racism and segregation; enforcement of the Civil Rights Act did not occur in the Zone until the 1970s. Yet for those Zonians who remain—and the many others who annually congregate in Orlando—the PCZ was an important manifestation of U.S. power in our “near abroad.” As recent geopolitical events indicate, its loss may be a decision the United States comes to regret.
The post Trouble at the Panama Canal appeared first on The American Conservative.
The holiday has always served as a reminder of the Christian character of the American people.
O give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good: for His mercy endureth for ever. Ps. 107:1 (KJV)
As far as holidays go, Thanksgiving in America is a relative newcomer to the official calendar. Celebrated on various dates throughout New England in the colonies and during the early republic, it was federally proclaimed by President Lincoln on October 3, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. Despite the “the waste that has been made in the camp, the siege and the battle-field,” Lincoln nevertheless recognized that America had much for which to be thankful. Foreign nations had not taken advantage of the strife in order to launch their own assaults on the fractured union, and both the population and country continued to grow. America could “expect continuance of years with large increase of freedom,” Lincoln proclaimed, before giving the thanks to God for the country’s prosperity:
No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.
In words which echo Psalm 107, Lincoln makes the case for his invitation to Americans to celebrate “a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” His fellow Americans were quick to answer that invitation, and the custom of celebrating Thanksgiving has only grown in the intervening years.
But Lincoln did not invent Thanksgiving, nor was the decision to proclaim it his idea alone. Rather, the American editor and author, Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, had long campaigned for a presidential proclamation to this effect, writing to five successive presidents in turn, beginning with Zachary Taylor, before she was able to persuade Lincoln to act. Her indefatigable enthusiasm for Thanksgiving was evidenced decades before Lincoln’s proclamation, in the eighth chapter of her novel, Northwood (1827), which details the menu on offer at a traditional Thanksgiving: a roasted turkey, savory stuffing, a sirloin of beef, a leg of pork, a joint of mutton, innumerable bowls of gravy and plates of vegetables, a goose, a pair of ducklings, chicken pie, pumpkin pie, pickles, preserves, butter, white bread, a huge plumb pudding, custards, pies “of every name and description ever known in Yankee land,” several kinds of rich cake, a variety of sweetmeats and fruits, currant wine, excellent cider, and ginger beer (but no ardent spirits).
Hale’s portrayal of Thanksgiving in Northwood is replete with details not only of the meal, but also of the motivations which underpinned the customs of its celebration. The dining table “was now intended for the whole household, every child having a seat on this occasion, and the more the better, it being considered an honor for a man to sit down to his Thanksgiving supper surrounded by a large family.” And the blessing “was not merely a form of words, mechanically mumbled over to comply with an established custom, or perform as an irksome duty—It was the breathings of a good and grateful heart acknowledging the mercies received, and sincerely thanking the Giver of every good gift for the plenteous portion he had bestowed.” And an outsider—an Englishman—is invited to partake along with the family, by whom he is hospitably welcomed as an honored guest.
Hence the traditions of Thanksgiving as Hale describes them, perfectly enjoyable in their own right, are accompanied by salutary customs of mind that are conducive to the moral and spiritual outlook of a Christian people: hospitality, celebration of family, and the duty of thanks and praise owed to the Creator of the universe. It was this conception of Thanksgiving that Hale had in mind when she wrote to five American presidents. Her desire to see it spread throughout the land was grounded in her belief that it would be to the great moral and spiritual good of the American people to celebrate such a holiday.
At around the same time that Hale was writing Northwood, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was making his first attempts at serious poetry. A New England man, Longfellow would certainly have been familiar with the traditional celebration of Thanksgiving, and hence it may seem unsurprising to find, amongst the earliest of his juvenile poems, one entitled, “Thanksgiving” (probably written at the beginning of the 1820s). The poem eschews any description of the customs of the public holiday in favor of an exploration of the offering of thanks and praise to God. The opening lines part the veil of history in order to depict the Biblical origins of thanks-giving:
When first in ancient time, from Jubal’s tongue
The tuneful anthem filled the morning air,
To sacred hymnings and elysian song
His music-breathing shell the minstrel woke.
Devotion breathed aloud from every chord:
The voice of praise was heard in every tone,
And prayer and thanks to Him, the Eternal One,
To Him, that with bright inspiration touched
The high and gifted lyre of heavenly song,
And warmed the soul with new vitality.
Jubal is a Biblical figure mentioned only once, in Genesis 4:21, where he is described as the father of those who play the lyre and the pipes. Just as Hale’s Northwood uses the descriptions of ordinary customs (hospitality, dinner, offering grace) as a means to explore the deeper substance that lies behind tradition, Longfellow’s “Thanksgiving” uses Jubal’s playing of music to explore the relation of the natural world to its Creator. The song he sings, and the music from his lyre, wake in Nature a song of praise, heard in every breeze and waterfall, and culminating in its infinite expression:
The morning stars, that sweetly sang together;
The moon, that hung at night in the mid-sky;
Dayspring and eventide; and all the fair
And beautiful forms of nature, had a voice
Of eloquent worship.
It is this expression of worship, of nature’s thanks-giving (paradoxically echoing man’s thanks-giving) that lies beneath Hale’s depiction of the blessing over the meal and Lincoln’s invitation to join in the new holiday. “And have our hearts grown cold?” asks Longfellow’s poem, “Are there on earth / no pure reflections caught from heavenly light? / Have our mute lips no hymn? Our souls no song?” The solution comes in the final line, at once an affirmation to both Hale and Lincoln alike: “Praise Him that rules the destiny of man.”
The post A Literary Thanksgiving appeared first on The American Conservative.
A new book captures the Soviet Sixties, the last decade when Russian Communists felt optimistic.
The Soviet Sixties, Robert Hornsby, Yale University Press, 675 pages
When the coup plotters overthrew Nikita Khrushchev on October 14, 1964, springing their trap at a meeting of the Presidium with a motion to strip him of all his party and state posts, Khrushchev went willingly. His son Sergei recalled his father grumbling when he returned home that night: “I am old and tired. Let them cope by themselves.” Nothing like this could have happened to Stalin, Khrushchev added, but now “the fear is gone and we can talk as equals. That’s my contribution. I won’t put up a fight.”
Had things really changed? Was the Soviet Union in the 1960s and ’70s a freer country? Yes, argues Robert Hornsby in The Soviet Sixties. The book fills a gap in the average American’s understanding of the history of Communism, which generally skips straight from purges to perestroika. There was a long period in between when the Soviet Union was not the groaning, dysfunctional gerontocracy of recent memory. The standard of living was lower than in the United States but improving rapidly. The two Cold War powers seemed evenly matched. No one was afraid of the midnight knock on the door anymore.
The Sixties in the Soviet Union began with Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” on February 25, 1956. By acknowledging Stalin’s crimes, it signaled the start of a more open era. Amazingly, the speech could easily have gone very differently or not been given at all. When Khrushchev proposed the idea, many Presidium members said it was a bad idea, some because they sincerely did not think Stalin deserved execration, others because they worried it would undermine their own position since they had all served Stalin during the period in question. They urged Khrushchev to postpone the speech until more historical research could be done or to leaven his criticism with praise for Stalin’s accomplishments. It was Nikolai Bulganin who backed up Khrushchev and said he must give the speech as intended, because “party members could already see that the attitude toward Stalin had changed” and “it would look cowardly not to raise the issue.”
There was still oppression in the new era, but nothing like the bad old days. Hornsby gives the number of prosecutions for counterrevolutionary crimes per year: In the late 1940s, the average was 100,000; in the early 1950s, 40,000; in 1954, 2,000; in 1955, 1,000; in 1956, 400. In 1957, during the last big crackdown on dissent, it ticked back up to 2,000, but “less than 2 percent were jailed for ten years or more; and nobody was executed.” There was also none of the deranged paranoia from the top that had characterized the Terror. Under Khrushchev, Hornsby says, “convictions were seemingly rooted in concrete events that had actually happened, rather than in invented conspiracies.”
People who made off-color jokes about party leaders in the workplace were not sent off to the gulag anymore. They were instead given the profilaktika (phrophylaxis) treatment, which came in two forms. “Open” prophylaxis meant your workplace or your apartment block would bring up your error at a public meeting, give you a chance to apologize, and offer suggestions for improvement. “Private” prophylaxis meant the local KGB would invite you for a chat, warn that they were watching you, and explain the consequences of continuing on your path. “The use of intimidation from officialdom (rather than outright repression) and social pressure from the wider public were to be at the heart of this new approach to tackling the erring citizen without branding them ‘anti-Soviet’ at the first sign of trouble,” Hornsby writes. Perhaps it did work. According to the KGB, “the majority of those subjected to prophylactic measures did not offend again.”
All of this mellowing took place under an unlikely reformer. Khrushchev was, after all, a former protege of Stalin. He was also very stupid. He once gave a speech in Tashkent praising the wonderful Tajiks in the audience for their success in growing cotton, which they were doing much better than those lazy Uzbeks next door. An aide had to quickly tell him that it was actually Uzbeks he was talking to. But Khrushchev’s impulsiveness had its upside. If something struck him as a good idea, he would do it, without thinking too much about how to rationalize his decision ideologically. That was how Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to publish his camp novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in the literary journal Novy Mir in November 1962. Khrushchev bypassed the censors and gave the editors his personal permission.
Most Russian liberals were still determined to work within the system. The Soviet Union had many flaws, they reasoned, but these would be corrected through reform, not by overthrowing the government. In contrast to American and European campuses during this period, university students did not riot or declare their government illegitimate. The only campus unrest Hornsby mentions involved students from the Third World. Twenty Nigerian university students brawled with their Russian peers in Leningrad in 1964 “after months of escalating tensions had gone un-addressed.” A Ghanaian student named Edmund Assare-Addo was found dead in a gutter in Moscow in December 1963, and friends claimed he was knifed to death by a Russian who resented his pursuit of Slavic women (Russian authorities said the victim passed out drunk in the snow). Five hundred African students gathered in Red Square to stage a protest against racism, drawing the attention of the Western press.
For the average Russian, the Sixties had nothing to do with the treatment of dissidents, of whom there were very few. The story was rising living standards. One million Russian households owned T.V. sets in 1955. It was 10 million by 1963 and 25 million by 1969. The number of people working in the retail sector doubled over the course of the decade. Some of this was a conscious choice by party leaders to reorient the economy toward consumer goods. Some of it was having more prosperity to go around in the first place: between 1961 and 1969, the first Siberian oil deposits were tapped and Russia became a net exporter of oil.
The space race was competitive, with the Soviets beating America into orbit with Sputnik in 1957 and then sending the first man into space with Vostok 1 on April 12, 1961, a date still celebrated today in Russia as Cosmonautics Day. When Yuri Gagarin returned to earth, he landed hundreds of miles off course in the Saratov Oblast and had to hitch a ride with a peasant woman on a horse-drawn cart to find a telephone. Something about that juxtaposition, captured in a famous photograph, conveys the essence of the Soviet Sixties: the old world of the village and the new world of space travel joined in a common enterprise, making their ramshackle way into the future.
Something else the Gagarin episode captures is the self-confidence Russians felt during the Sixties, to an extent rare in their history and not just the Communist period. Hornsby quotes a computer programmer who remembers the high quality of Russian technology under Khrushchev but sighs, “We made our last good computer in 1962.” As Hornsby explains, the decline was the result of “opting to copy Western blueprints, rather than producing home-grown designs.” This echoes something American scholar Donald Raleigh records in his oral history of Soviet Baby Boomers. One interviewee tells him that, under Brezhnev, “You’d come with an idea, let’s say, and the first question that arose was ‘And over there in the West? Do they have this? If they don’t have it, then why do we need it?’ Under Khrushchev this question never arose.”
Every country ought to feel that kind of self-respect, even our enemies, even those that operate under evil systems of government, as Communism surely was. Reading about Russia’s reforms and successes during the period in Hornsby’s book, I did not find myself, as a reader, rooting for them to win the Cold War. Yet I did not want them to hurry up and reach the cultural cringe of the 1980s when they felt they could do nothing right, either.
To close with a personal anecdote: When I gave birth to my youngest son, the delivery room nurse happened to be from Belarus. We started talking about Slavic matters, since my husband is Russian, and I made a joke about going into labor so close to Cosmonautics Day and how if the baby had arrived a few days earlier, I would have had no choice but to name him “Yuri.” As soon as I said it, I felt like an idiot, because I had no idea whether Cosmonautics Day is taken seriously in Belarus or regarded as a relic or a joke. To my surprise, the nurse nodded with great seriousness, “Yes, Cosmonautics Day.” And then after a long pause said, “He was a great man.”
How strange, I thought, to have a new holiday on the calendar that commemorates one of your country’s great accomplishments instead of some historical sin like slavery or indigenous genocide. In the totally unironic way this woman spoke of Gagarin’s greatness, I detected honest civilizational pride. There were many things in Hornsby’s book that reminded me of the country I live in today, including ideological profilaktika. That pride was the biggest difference.
The post The Spaceman and the Horse Cart appeared first on The American Conservative.
Panda diplomacy was always a mirage, at best.
I live about ten minutes away from the Smithsonian National Zoo, and I don’t think that in all the times I have been there I’ve ever seen a single panda. Oh, sure, I’ve seen their enclosure; it’s essentially a ground-level Metro station—all concrete and glass, decorated with a few sprigs of bamboo to suggest the abstraction Panda—but never have I glimpsed the creatures which Barack Obama once claimed “dazzle” the children of America.
Not that it matters anymore. Last week, in the middle of the night, zoo employees drugged the three pandas on loan from China, packed them in FedEx trucks, and shipped them back to the People’s Republic. Some have compared their departure to that fateful night in 1984 when the Baltimore Colts picked up their helmets and pads and fled for Indianapolis. But I think the more appropriate analogy is the O.J. Simpson chase. The morning of Nov. 7, every news helicopter in the Washington area followed those FedEx trucks as they trundled with a police escort down to Dulles Airport.
The coverage was breathless, and for native Washingtonians, it was impossible to look away. We have panda statues all over this town; we slap their faces on t-shirts and birthday cakes. Somewhere along the way, it seems, we forgot that they didn’t really belong to us. Their departure was fittingly billed as a catastrophe in slow motion, the instantiation of a tearing in relations between two great powers.
Of course, this is always how it was going to end. Panda diplomacy, the term of art for the manner in which China loans out its national ursids, makes sense only when a weaker power must grovel before a stronger one. The origins of the arrangement are instructive. When Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, his wife Pat went to the Peking Zoo specifically to see the pandas. Later, at a state dinner, she was seated next to the Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, and she noticed on the table a box of cigarettes wrapped in pink tissue and decorated with pandas.
“Aren’t they cute?” she said. “I love them.”
Zhou, that crafty revolutionary, who even then was fighting for his survival in the Cultural Revolution, did not miss the easy opportunity to score points with the American president’s wife: “I’ll give you some,” he said, and arrangements were made.
Two months later, the pandas arrived as promised in D.C., and Pat Nixon tootled up Connecticut Ave. to dedicate their new enclosure. The scene was one that only could have occurred in mid-century, pre-Watergate Washington. It was a gray day, as colorless as the overweight, sloppily dressed bureaucrats rolled out for the occasion. Speeches were made, vague gestures at international brotherhood and scientific progress. Pat Nixon laughed her way through the proceedings. Her hair looked like a cream puff.
There was one incongruity: the Chinese diplomats sent to present the bears. These were stern men with drawn faces in high-collared work shirts, who had very likely committed horrible crimes to survive party purges and fought off dozens of other contenders to be sent on this delegation. When they spoke, they did not smile.
I’m not sure panda diplomacy ever developed beyond that moment. Pat Nixon declared, in an oft-repeated line among Smithsonian National Zoo devotees, that she believed “panda-monium” would break out among the children in D.C. (she counted herself one of these). And the Chinese delegation took her at her word: The pandas were for children, and could be taken away as soon as the children misbehave.
Hence their departure. I’m sure someone with expert knowledge in foreign policy could outline the exact ways in which the end of panda diplomacy aligns with worsening relations between the United States and China, but for most people it just looks like punishment inflicted on the panda-lovers of our country.
For my own part, I say good riddance. The pandas were burdensome creatures: always sick, or asleep, or away in the lab for an ill-fated attempt at artificial insemination. Dealing with them was a lot like our relationship with China: The experience has left both sides wondering if it is really worth the trouble—at least on the current terms. And I find it unsurprising that in 25 years of living around Washington, D.C., I never once saw them. The pandas proved as elusive as their diplomacy.
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High-profile conversions to Christianity aren’t easy. In a secular age, the convert’s rationality, if not his sanity, is immediately cast into doubt. Meanwhile, the Christian community can be highly critical, skewering the convert over his failure to mention this or that aspect of the faith in his public statement, if a public statement has been made (or alternately interrogating him if he has neglected to explain himself at all). .
So it was with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who announced her turn to the Christian faith in an essay for UnHerd over the weekend. In Christianity, she has discovered the deepest roots of Western civilization. The faith, she wrote, represents “the story of the West, warts and all.” It is the foundation of the humaneness and decency that the Somali-born writer and activist cherishes about life in her adoptive home. But more than that, it offers the best answer to the question: “What is the meaning and purpose of life?”
Active in Dutch politics as a secular critic of European Islamism, Hirsi Ali shot to global stardom in the wake of 9/11. Western hawks and liberal interventionists celebrated her as a prototypical citizen of the sorts of societies they hoped to bring about in Muslim lands. And she became increasingly associated with the so-called New Atheists who dominated post-9/11 discourse, men like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and, above all, Christopher Hitchens. So absolute and uncompromising were her pronouncements in favor of “Hitch”-style secularism, the critic Ian Buruma labeled Hirsi Ali, not unjustly, an “Enlightenment fundamentalist.”
Yet there is nothing fundamentalist about the Christianity Hirsi Ali now espouses. Indeed, she has come to view Christianity as an indispensable antidote to irrationality, a guardian of right reason. Her erstwhile atheist idols, she explains, expected the death of God to usher “an age of reason and intelligent humanism.” But the opposite happened: “The ‘God hole’—the void left by the retreat of the Church—has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action.”
Amen.
Yet precisely the civilizational emphasis in Hirsi Ali’s conversion story has invited a number of believers to question her motives and even her authenticity. Christianity might be a better answer to age-old human problems than narrow-minded scientism or woke-ism, they note, but where is Christ in all this? Has Hirsi Ali even assented to the basic teachings of “mere Christianity”: that the one God took it upon himself to heal the breach caused by our first ancestors, becoming man, dying on the Cross, and rising again on the third day?
These aren’t irrelevant questions. But they are to be asked by the ministers of Hirsi Ali’s church, not by the Christian public at large. For the rest of us, the civilizational or cultural case for converting to Christianity should be enough. Indeed, the very fact that these are the first questions that pop into the Christian public’s mind is a symptom of the loss of public, cultural Christianity and the faith’s sad confinement to a narrow, individualistic sphere. Historic Christianity, by contrast, spread civilizationally.
How else could the Church of apostles and martyrs have converted the Roman Empire from the inside out? It certainly didn’t have tribal armies to command (as the prophet Muhammad did). No, Roman people, often beginning with Roman elites, turned to Christianity because Christian life was attractive: In a late-Roman world characterized by decadence, oppression, infant exposure, rising divorce, and collapsing fertility, the followers of this strange sect lived justly and humanely.
The association between the Church and civilization deepened with the Constantinian conversion, a phenomenon that saw the Christian share of the empire spike dramatically: Did every new convert understand every article of the creed? Hardly. As the French patrologist Jean Cardinal Danielou noted, for many of these newly Christianized masses, the faith was little more than a set of external rituals. And yet immersion in a Christian civilization benefited these masses from both the temporal and eternal perspectives.
Even today, someone like Hirsi Ali discerns the outline of Christian civilization framing Western democracies that remain “marked by the Cross,” as Pierre Manent says, try as they might to erase the mark. When Hirsi Ali identifies Christianity as a religion that has left behind its dogmatic phase to embrace reasoned debate and free speech, she no doubt oversimplifies things. Yet she isn’t finally wrong. The monotheism whose God is Logos itself, reason-made-flesh, has yielded a very different civilizational than, say, Islam, for whom God is ineffably Other, neither reasonable nor to be reasoned about.
In understanding the difference, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has risen far above her New Atheist milieu. And this should cheer Christians, rather than drive them to smoke out an “inauthentic” believer.
The post In Defense of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Conversion appeared first on The American Conservative.
Master and Commander: Far Side of the World is slavish to reality in trivialities, and pure fantasy in much greater, more complicated matters.
How I long for a good new movie. I can only watch the good old ones so many times. Rather than wear them out in my mind, I must leave longer and longer gaps between viewings. I have had this yearning for many years now, and it is not often fulfilled. How I hoped, 20 years ago, that the attempt to film Patrick O’Brian’s Napoleonic War novels would fill the chasm. But oh, how it did not do so.
Somebody the other day described the British Empire as an irritating appendage to the Royal Navy, and this is very much how I view the history of my country. Having been introduced, at an early age, to what was then Her Majesty’s Navy, I have seen every other human institution in the world as its inferior. A certain kind of quiet and unassuming courage was involved, exemplified in 1940 by Captain Bernard Warburton-Lee, horribly maimed by a German shell on the open bridge of his destroyer in a snowstorm. Asked at this awkward moment for his orders to the rest of his flotilla, he replied briskly “Continue to engage the enemy,” and then unobtrusively died.
This goes with a certain kind of profound but understated humor, and all takes place aboard ships of great power, romance, and beauty—now mainly vanished—which I count myself very lucky to have seen at all. This I owe to my late father, a schoolteacher’s son who more or less ran away to sea to escape a comfortable but constrained life of suburban Strict Baptist piety and sabbath silence. The Navy was his life for more than 30 years, much of it at sea very far from home. We had his sword in the house—made by Messrs Wilkinson, who later turned to the more profitable manufacture of razor blades—with its gritty sharkskin hilt, designed to stop it slipping in the hand even when covered in the enemy’s blood. It takes hold of you, that sort of thing.
I am still puzzled but delighted by an experience I had during a visit to a Royal Navy frigate at sea, perhaps 30 years ago. I had been winched down from a helicopter onto the heaving deck, and entertained kindly but not excessively by the officers in the wardroom before taking to my bunk. In the small hours I woke to the gentle, busy sounds of a warship at sea. The watch was changing and I heard, very softly over the public address loudspeakers, the words “Call to hands!”—a phrase I knew I had never heard before in my life but which I also somehow knew I had heard a thousand times. Why should we not inherit memory?
So when my late brother Christopher (who I think shared with me a reverence for the Navy) urged me to read Patrick O’Brian’s books about Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin, I was immediately drawn into what became a sort of modern Odyssey.
Jack Aubrey is a genius afloat and a fool on land. He is repeatedly saved from his landward folly by Stephen, a part Irish, part Catalan Catholic, brilliant thinker, scornful of Bonaparte’s despotism, and an intrepid spy. Stephen, endearingly, remains permanently baffled and exasperated by the Navy’s mad language of futtocks and clews, grog and duff—and a particular kind of splice too rude to mention. (They still use this peculiar tongue. I have an outdated smattering of it to this day.) He is also an adventurous medical man quite uninhibited by normal rules of propriety—on one occasion he greets an old acquaintance loudly and in public with the words “How is your penis?” Alas, the news is not good.
I know, absolutely, what they both look like, and how their voices sound. I can without difficulty picture Jack Aubrey’s face, though it is some time since I have read the books. It is not the face of Russell Crowe, who played him 20 years ago in Peter Weir’s peculiar and unsatisfactory film, which was I think meant to be the first of several.
Why do I not like it?
It is partly that, for the reader, the imaginary Jack Aubrey is too well drawn to be played by any living man. That is not just his smile, nor his laugh, nor his way of command, nor his majestic power of thought when in peril or battle.
It is partly that, as with so many films, vast resources have been used to get the buttons of the uniforms, the curl of the whiskers and the rigging exactly as they would have been 200 years ago. But simple matters of language and custom are sloppily ignored. At one point it is necessary for the ship’s company to pray, and the Captain must lead them. And he intones a version of the Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father, who art in heaven”) that modern ignoramuses think is archaic enough to serve for a film about the past. But educated Englishmen know it to be a pestilent modern innovation. If they had to have prayers, they might at least have had him say the majestic 17th-century “Navy Prayer,” which thrillingly begins “O eternal Lord God, who alone spreadest out the heavens and rulest the raging of the sea; who hast compassed the waters with bounds until day and night come to an end…” If you think it too long or too hard, watch again that great Naval film In Which We Serve (whose title is taken from that same prayer) and watch Noel Coward, as Captain Kinross, recite it to his ship’s company without hesitation or embarrassment in a scene set in 1939.
But these are, I suppose, quibbles. Had I been asked to sculpt a film from these books, I would have begun it with Jack Aubrey’s stealthy, ruthless, and bloody rescue of Stephen Maturin from his French captors and torturers in Port Mahon, Minorca. This would have made an astonishingly potent opening scene and alerted the audience to the fact that we have, in these stories, much more than just another sea saga of creaking rigging and booming cannons. The rescue occurs in the book HMS Surprise, but it immediately introduces the watcher to Stephen Maturin’s secret life as a spy, and could easily enough be grafted onto many of the other books.
But my deeper objection is to a grave and mistaken attempt to alter a major element of the books. The title of the 2003 film is Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. And The Far Side of the World is the title of a book to which a lot of the film is closely related—except for one thing. It pits Aubrey in a conflict with the United States Navy, which is harrying British whalers. This important moment in British and American Naval History is also dealt with in an earlier book, The Fortune of War, in which Aubrey takes a slight role in the great 1813 duel off Boston between the USS Chesapeake and HMS Shannon.
These two ships, beautiful, evenly-matched, both with brave and chivalrous captains, fought briefly and savagely and the Americans lost. The War of 1812 might easily have been the first of many between America and Englnd. The soppy view of permanent Anglo-American brotherhood is entirely wrong, ignoring as it does Washington’s stinging fury when Britain built commerce raiders for the Confederacy, and their growing naval rivalry before and after the 1914–18 war. During a voyage to London in December 1918, Woodrow Wilson told his aides that if Britain did not come to terms over sea power, America would “build the biggest Navy in the world, matching theirs and exceeding it…and if they would not limit it, there would come another and more terrible and bloody war and England would be wiped off the face of the map.”
The historian Adam Tooze revealed recently that growing naval confrontation between these two supposed shoulder-to-shoulder eternal friends was so bitter that “by the end of March 1919 relations between the naval officers of the two sides had degenerated to such an extent that the admirals threatened war and had to be restrained from assaulting each other.” My father’s attitude towards the U.S. Navy was never especially generous (I used to wonder why) and he perhaps recalled the Suez crisis during which the then head of the USN, Admiral Arleigh Burke, discussed open warfare between the two nations with the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.
Dulles wondered out loud if there was any way to stop Britain’s Fleet from launching its attack on Egypt in 1956. Admiral Burke later recalled (in a recorded conversation which can still be listened to by visitors to his archive at Princeton’s gloriously named Mudd Library): “And I said, “Mr. Secretary, there is only one way to stop them. We can stop them. But we will blast the hell out of them.” He went on to explain, “The only way you can stop them is to shoot. And we can do that. We can defeat them—the British and the French and the Egyptians and the Israelis—the whole goddam works of them we can knock off, if you want. But that’s the only way to do it.”
This was the greatest war that never quite happened, and The Far Side of the World describes its distant origins. But the film-makers foolishly thought that the public, British or American, were not ready for the truth about the relations between the two greatest naval powers that ever existed. And so they invented a skirmish that never existed, in fiction or fact, with France. Again, they ensured authenticity in trivial matters, but avoided it in the important things.
What a great film they could have made but didn’t. I shall just have to watch In Which We Serve yet again, and cry yet again when Celia Johnson (yet again) makes her great speech about the tribulations of Navy wives, and think of my mother.
The post A Great Film That Wasn’t appeared first on The American Conservative.
Some labels are just about chasing normal people out of the polite mainstream.
As if you had not been told already, hardly a day goes by without a headline reminding us that, after something of an autumnal carnival, habemus—we have a speaker of the House. A theme has emerged in the media coverage. Mike Johnson is a “Christian nationalist,” we are told over and over again, in pieces from Time, from Politico, and from New York Magazine, from Salon, from the Washington Post, and from the New York Times (those are just the outlets you have heard of).
And if, as the Jesus and John Wayne author Kristen Du Mez said on MSNBC this weekend, they mean by that tag just what sociologists have labeled “Christian nationalism,” then they are right, so far as it goes. But throat-clearing clarifications that this is a non-pejorative academic label should feel like fig leaves, surrounded as they always are by the breathless language of danger, fear, and condemnation.
The assessments of Johnson highlight an ambiguity in the discourse about Christian nationalism and in the term itself, which American Christians in particular should bear in mind as the confusion is used to marginalize and manipulate them. The signifier “Christian nationalist” acts as both an allegedly dispassionate sociological descriptor and, usually with “white” attached at the front, a catch-all for the bad people who don’t want to replace the stars and stripes with the vexillologically dysphoric “progress” flag. Plus, of course, some people even call themselves Christian nationalists in defiance of the condemnation.
All these competing uses continue to be muddled in the mind of the general public. The establishment media and liberal evangelicals who make a living out of complaining to a secular elite about their benighted coreligionists continue to use the ambiguity to their political advantage. It is a blatant effort to push a position held by many elected officials out of the mainstream. The real target is normal conservative evangelicals in politics; fixation on allegedly extremist niche theory is a weapon of convenience.
The checklists used by third-rate sociologists to define Christian nationalism are so generic as to be almost useless. That is the point, insofar as they can catch up a significant portion of American evangelicalism. When expressed in plain language without sufficient high-status jargon and hedging, conservative evangelicals’ normal view of faith and political life registers as “Christian nationalist” according to the semi-academic literature. It might be you.
You perhaps think your identity as a Christian is essential to your identity and actions as a citizen, because—though Christ’s kingdom is not of this world—you are a Christian citizen in a country that is made a nation by the rule of “we the people.” Thus, being your authentic self just like a good liberal, you believe you are your best as an American when you don’t hide your faith in public, especially in participating in political life. You are a good citizen because you try to be a good Christian, and it wouldn’t occur to you to pretend that’s not the case. You probably think America has been “a Christian nation,” or at least had a Christian society, and that God has blessed this country.
Christian nationalism made the jump from sociology departments to headlines and talking heads with the January 6 riot. The same people calling Johnson a Christian nationalist today were just as eager then to trot out the label for the rioters. But as Daniel Strand, an ethics professor at the Air War College, documented in these pages last year, the assertion that something called Christian nationalism had motivated those who entered the Capitol was made without evidence. It had been a prime opportunity to make a specialization into the topic of the moment, to provide a chaotic situation with some narrative coherence and raise personal profiles to boot; it wasn’t wasted, even if prosecutions would fail to uncover anything particularly religious about participants’ motives.
The conversations about the phrase have continued since then, as Christian political thinkers and public figures decided that if they were going to be called “Christian nationalists” anyway, they might as well own it. Maybe America was a Christian nation. Maybe it could become one. For a combination of historical and theoretical reasons, some American Christians do believe the United States, a country of many nations, can become a singular nation—a distinct people among the peoples of the earth—by being consecrated or consecrating itself to the temporal and spiritual goods revealed, according to Christian tradition, both in nature and divine revelation. This is a self-conscious Christian nationalism, and those advancing it make sophisticated theological and political-philosophical claims in what largely remains an elite conversation among pastors, academics, and literati.
Except, of course, when it is pulled into headlines. The professional Christian nationalism–watchers regularly elide the differences between the sociological label, the supposed insurrectionists, and the so-called extremists willing to take the concept seriously. It is a classic rhetorical sleight of hand; perhaps it has a given name somewhere, but I think of it as a sort of “motte and bailey” routine on the attack. In argumentation, the motte and bailey is employed when, under pressure, a less-defensible position is defined down to a defensible one, retreating from the outer fortifications of the bold bailey to the security of the anodyne motte. In the case of Christian nationalism, we see the offensive version, in which the charge of extremism and treason is implied, with protestations that this is a non-pejorative technical description.
The goal is clear: to make unapologetic conservative Christianity unacceptable in public life. Mike Johnson is being called a Christian nationalist because, while he may not identify as such, he is one, according to the progressive frame. So long as progressives control the frame of Christian nationalism, they can suggest it is disqualifying. One response is to own it, for evangelicals to redefine it for themselves; that conversation is happening. But to wrest the frame from those who hate conservative Christians participating in politics, who will call you a Christian nationalist no matter what you say, the first step is to not care.
The post Mike Johnson’s Christian Nationalism—And Yours appeared first on The American Conservative.
As America grows apart from Europe, where does that leave Germany? An interview with the German AfD politician Maximilian Krah may help answer that question.
Maximilian Krah, 46, is part of the national leadership of the German political party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and is a member of the E.U. parliament. During the July 2023 nominating convention of the AfD, he was elected to be the party’s lead candidate for next year’s elections to the E.U. parliament. He is the author of the book Politik von rechts. Ein Manifest (Antaios, 2023).
You open your book Politik von rechts (Politics From the Right) by distinguishing the political Right from other terms that are often used synonymously, such as “conservative” or “libertarian.” What in your eyes is the essence of the Right?
It is the will to live in accordance with the natural order, with both empirical nature and with the metaphysical structure of being that is inherent to nature. This distinguishes 19th century conservatism, at least in its European variant, from liberalism. We believe that from being arises an ought, and we want to live in harmony and identity with that which we are and with creation. That is why the Right is identitarian.
Anglo-American conservatives will be bewildered by this. They often say they are “classical liberals,” which to them means to defeat identity politics and to defend the autonomy of the individual.
First of all, let’s make plain that I seek identity with reality. Leftist identity politics is chimerical. If I were to suddenly say that I’m no longer Maximilian, I’m Melinda now, that would be ridiculous. In other words, for the Left, identity is a code word for something that isn’t there. It’s an attack on reality. The problem with classical liberalism is that it misunderstands the concept of freedom. And it’s a misunderstanding that it shares with the woke. So if I want to be Melinda now, it’s my own free decision. But once we say that Maximilian cannot be Melinda, we draw on a principle that is more fundamental than freedom. We on the Right understand nature normatively, which quite obviously limits our freedom. Once I grant that there are limits to my freedom due to a normatively understood concept of nature, only then do I prevent freedom’s misuse. And only then does freedom become a positive value.
You also write that identity “always also excludes.” Let’s use that statement to segue toward addressing the elephant in the room. By seeking to exclude, for example in its views on immigration, the AfD is viewed by many at home and abroad as the rebirth of National Socialism. Is it?
It’s a giant problem in the Western world today that it cannot bear differences. But we need to learn to like differences. We aren’t all the same. Difference is a gain. Traditionally, Germans have been an innovative, industrious, orderly people. But it’s just as good that elsewhere in the world people have a higher musicality or a higher appreciation for the aesthetic. If we give up on difference, we give up on tremendous wealth. And then we arrive at a horribly mediocre common denominator. But we need the highs and the lows. This appreciation of difference is definitely crucial for right-wing thought, simply because you find difference in nature too.
Regarding the charge that the AfD was the second coming of Nazism: To say “long live difference” means also to accept that others have their own qualities and that we don’t say we’re the best. In other words, the problem emerges when I group people in a hierarchical way by saying: “Our way of life is much better than that of others and that’s why they have to follow our lead.” And so, 20th century European fascism lacked the appreciation of difference. That, I think, is the key distinction and that’s why I don’t think we are National Socialism reincarnated.
Let’s talk about whom to exclude from the European continent. You draw on Carl Schmitt to call for a “Ban on Intervention for Spatially Foreign Powers.” The United States is spatially foreign—so Yankee out?
Geopolitics means that politics is bound geographically. It’s bound to place, locally specific cultural characteristics, to the economy, to natural resources, and so on. In short, it’s crucial to reconnect politics with space and the people that live there. Whereas a politics that doesn’t deal with real spaces and real people, but just with abstract values, is a politics that leads to forever wars. This is what we’re dealing with today. In cultural and ethnic terms, the United States was once a European power. Americans were the descendants of Europeans. By 2045, it will no longer be European.
Which leads to this question: How can a country that is moving away from Europe dominate it at the same time? This question poses itself very concretely in Ukraine. Obviously you see that the United States does not have the well-being of the Ukrainian population on the top of its mind. After all, we are right now sacrificing the Ukrainian youth in this moronic war: a war that could have easily been avoided. Clearly, this war is about America’s ambition to push back against Russia. It is a war for world order. And Washington has effectively taken over Kiev which cannot do anything without American approval. The U.S. finances Ukraine, arms it, makes strategic decisions on its behalf.
Has Berlin also been taken over by Washington? Does Germany operate as a sovereign state, independent of American will?
Berlin is in a different weight class. We are, for one, capable of financing ourselves. But the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines means that the United States has decided that Germany cannot buy its gas from Russia and has simply created a fait accompli. And our government in Berlin knows this and is silent. Is this how a sovereign state acts or a vassal? But I don’t like the concept of sovereignty because it is too binary: sovereign and not sovereign. Whereas I think sovereignty falls along a spectrum. The highest level of sovereignty would mean that you can do as you please without consideration for others. That applies only to the United States, China, and Russia. Thus, if Ukraine would join NATO, Russia would no longer be on this level of sovereignty. Russia is no longer capable of defending itself when there is a foreign power in Kharkov. And so, Russia is fighting in Ukraine for its ability to maintain the highest level of sovereignty.
Germany has never been on this level, not even before World War I. It was always bound up with its neighbors and needed to consider their interests. That was a good thing. It was a mistake to want more. It cost us the 20th century. I like to say “sovereign is the one who has alternatives.” I need to be able to have choices in the most crucial matters, such as energy and technology. Germany wanted to order 5G technology from Huawei, and the United States forbade that. Much of German gas once came from Russia. The United States forbade that. Now we are one-sidedly dependent on energy imports from America. This knocks us down quite a bit on the sovereignty spectrum.
What about the European Union? Do you advocate a “Dexit”?
I do not. Precisely because the world will be multipolar in the future, Europe needs to be an autonomous pole. All states, except the U.S., China, and Russia, can only achieve security through systems of collective security. If there were no European federation, no E.U., no replacement organization, then each European nation would have to seek a security agreement with the United States. A country like the Czech Republic can’t defend itself; nor can Hungary. The experience of the Cold War has taught us that Russia is unattractive.
But I just said America was growing apart from Europe. And we can see in the example of Ukraine that such a security agreement can be pretty sobering. I, for one, would not like to end like Ukraine. Charles de Gaulle advocated for a “Europe of the fatherlands,” whereas right now we have a bureaucratic unitary entity. So, drawing on de Gaulle, I’d say that internally we need as much freedom and sovereignty as possible and externally as many commonalities as necessary. Right now Europe acts chaotically toward the outside and internally it is incredibly centralized. I’d like to invert that.
How should Europe position itself toward the emerging BRICS coalition?
First of all, let’s push back against a widespread misconception on the right, that right now the U.S. is hegemonic and that the only alternative is Chinese hegemony. Even Brzezinski wrote that that’s nonsense. China and BRICS are an anti-hegemonic coalition. So I’d say it’s this way: We either have a Pax Americana, which I believe is necessarily woke and bellicose, or we have no sole global hegemony but regional hegemons instead who rule according to their own local preferences. And I’m not even saying that this latter model is better than the former. It’s just inevitable.
In 1913, the West was 30% of the world’s population; today it is 16%. And we’re aging fast. There are no demographic and economic foundations to believe that the West will govern the world uniformly according to its own universalistic ethos as a Kantian world state. The thing that remains is military power. In short, the multipolar order is inevitable. This means in turn that the E.U. will need to become its own pole and foster relations with others like the United States but also Russia, China, India, and so on. And these need to be mutual relations. We can’t order these states around and tell them how they should live.
I wanted to shift to the domestic policy views of the AfD: The party was founded by liberal economists and some prominent members belong to the free-market Friedrich von Hayek Society. But other party leaders seek to present it as pro-worker. Alexander Gauland said the AfD should “not fall below Bismarck’s social reforms.” You’re often associated with his wing of the party, but in your book you bemoan “the sinister power of the unions” and say the welfare state was throttling growth. Sounds like libertarianism to me.
The German welfare state has failed. It is oversized and its benefits act like a magnet for migrants. We can’t solve social problems with even greater redistribution, which would accelerate immigration even more and thus cause further problems. But privatizing social welfare would cause problems too. The Right has lost elections wherever it ignored the social question. Our novel contribution is that we need to connect the social question to immigration. In other words, we need a model of social solidarity that prevents most of the benefits from going to immigrants. In the AfD we call this “solidarity patriotism” (solidarischer Patriotismus). Current upheavals—such as immigration, A.I., the demographic crisis—lead decent individuals who belong to our people to experience hardships. And they have a claim to solidarity.
Are you concerned about competition from the popular left-wing politician Sahra Wagenknecht, who is also critical of open borders but is attractive to working-class voters? She will found a new political party, and according to some polls, could attract many current AfD voters. She said she will not collaborate with the AfD, though.
That’s precisely why Wagenknecht poses no threat to the AfD’s success. Wagenknecht and we say that status quo mainstream policies are running this country into the ground. And so we ask Wagenknecht: Are you ready to form a coalition with us? She says no. So everyone should get that she is nothing but a plant of the Social Democrats. We need to communicate that Wagenknecht cannot solve the immigration problem because she is a leftist. Just 50 percent of welfare recipients are German citizens. The German welfare state already ethnicizes the social question, only that it does that in favor of immigrants. And so, a vote for Wagenknecht would be a lost vote. Our voters know that. I believe that ultimately she will fail.
The post Europe After America appeared first on The American Conservative.
Why should we redouble efforts that have already failed in bringing stability to the Levant?
The atrocious attacks by Hamas militants against Israeli civilian and military targets has reminded the world that this conflict is always simmering just under the surface, breaking open with little warning or provocation. More strikingly, it underlines a hard truth that many U.S. leaders still seem unable to accept: that the Israel–Palestine conflict is a gordian knot the U.S. cannot untie.
The complexity of the problem lies in its genesis: Multiple religious groups lay claim to land that has a holy significance to them. Members on both sides feel obligated at the depths of their souls to fight for it with a zeal that money, military power, and the threat of death cannot overcome. The Israeli response to the attacks will likely be disproportionate, but the methods and goals of that response are solely Israel’s to determine. It is also very likely that the Hamas leadership expects such a response, and indeed might be counting on it to rally Islamic sentiments in the region, disrupt the growing relationship between Israel and some Arab governments, and breed the next generation of extremist fighters.
We can safely assume all this because we have seen it before; the scope is just larger now than it has been in decades. Throughout that time, no tool that the U.S. government has—from our military power and our well-funded intelligence apparatus to our economic and diplomatic strength—has been able to untangle the mess and provide a stable solution for all parties. This includes a number of tried tactics: the trilateral peace process of the Clinton administration, the unyielding support of Israel and aggressive posture towards Iran from the Trump administration, and the multilateral diplomacy of Presidents Obama and Biden. Each has offered shadows of hope behind the idealistic proclamations of their champions, but ultimately led back to the same end.
Is it because we haven’t found the right strings to pull to untie this? Or is it because no such combination exists, at least not for a third party located on the other side of the world?
As noted by others, stable coexistence in this multi-cultural, religious, and ethnic region is “almost inevitably imperial, with a leviathan maintaining the balance of power and enforcing top down order.” Whether externally from the Ottoman, British, or French empires, or internally from authoritarians like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, only an iron fist has been able to keep the lid on the pot—and only temporarily at that.
Is the U.S. willing to play such a role? Leaders and pundits wax eloquently from TV studios and think tank armchairs about the need for a protector of global order, but if a nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budget and hundreds of global bases have not proven sufficient, what will? While public opinion in our country supports Israel, especially when attacked, the appetite for prolonged military conflict was spent on Iraq and Afghanistan—two geopolitical problems less complicated than those faced in Israel. And any increased U.S. presence or influence in the region would be matched by Iran and possibly Russia, further twisting the knot.
We should not fall into the temptation of thinking that our advanced capabilities hold the key. The ability of Hamas fighters to catch the Israeli (and ostensibly the American) intelligence community by surprise should dispense with arguments that so-called “smart power” and our cutting-edge technology will be sufficient to end the conflict. Initial reports indicate that the Hamas operation to enter southern Israel was relatively low-tech, similar to the insurgencies against U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The issues underlying the Israel–Palestine conflict are deeper and more rooted than anything we are able to influence through our usual military and diplomatic tools. Much like the conflict in Ukraine, our modern ideals and solutions are buried under the weight of complex historical, ethnic, and religious factors that we either don’t understand or actively choose to ignore.
In the legend of the gordian knot, Alexander the Great overcomes the impossible challenge to untie it by pulling out his sword and cutting the knot in half. It has been the desire of many American leaders in the past decades to find such an elegant solution for the Israelis and Palestinians, but it does not exist. Perhaps our way of cutting the knot is to step back to recognize our limitations and refocus on our core national interests: Support for Israel may be understandable, but the U.S. has an interest in not seeing this conflict widen to involve other parties, including our own.
The post There Is No American Sword for the Israel–Palestine Gordian Knot appeared first on The American Conservative.
Tingley v. Ferguson will be a referendum on Christian morals in psychiatry.
May Christian counselors offer Christian counsel? This is the question the Supreme Court of the United States is expected to weigh in on this week.
If that sounds extreme, that’s because it is. If you are wondering why you have not heard about it yet, that is because the case, Tingley v. Ferguson, has been framed as a debate over “gay conversion therapy.” Brian Tingley, a licensed family counselor in Washington state, has challenged the state’s ban on conversion therapy, which extends to any conversation between a counselor and a minor client that pursues “change” of that young person’s perceived gender identity or sexual attractions.
Tingley is challenging on free speech grounds, but the question, for many Christian counselors, cuts deeper. The phrase “conversion therapy,” connoting religious radicalism in opposition to science, has been very effective in winning the cultural battle for those in favor of banning Christians from counseling gay people. But within the framing is a more fundamental argument. Christian counsel, which by definition questions the modern belief that sexual preferences are intrinsic to selfhood, is antithetical to the modern belief in the inalienable right to self creation.
The stakes in Tingley v. Ferguson are no less than this. USA Today called the case one of “Religion vs. LGBTQ+ Rights,” which is another way of saying the tension here is between the old religion and the new one, each of which determines the success or failure of a psychiatric treatment according to theological priors. The old religion sought the “healing of the soul” (the meaning of the word “psychiatry”) by helping an individual to conform himself to nature and nature’s God. In this older view, spiritual health and happiness stemmed from learning how to fit oneself into the existing world. The new religion seeks precisely the opposite, to affirm every person in his mental predilection, regardless of whether doing so harms or helps him, since the primary “right” in this world is the right to live unquestioned. The existing world, then, is shaped to fit the psychiatric patient.
Naturally, the old religion must be conquered before the new one may reign. As with debates over pandemic strategies, the left has worked hard to make the question one of science versus anti-science. Thus, we are told that the rubes who practice “gay conversation therapy” (in scare quotes, because you cannot find a counselor, including Joseph Nicolosi himself, who actually advertises his services as such) are archaic Bible thumpers who think gayness can be cured with fresh air and a few tongue lashings, or perhaps a social media fast and manual labor. Any serious, licensed medical practitioner should know better, and should denounce such anti-scientific approaches, according to this line of argument.
The Human Rights Campaign website lists “conversion therapy” or “reparative therapy” as “a range of dangerous and discredited practices that falsely claim to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.” Such practices, they add, have been “rejected by every mainstream medical and mental health organization for decades” and can lead to “depression, anxiety, drug use, homelessness, and suicide.”
HRC is correct about one thing: The fringe instances of electric shock therapy and public exorcisms that opponents cite are far from normative in the world of reparative therapy, especially where Christian counselors are concerned. Nevertheless, organizations like the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors, which offer, among other services, Christian counseling for those with same-sex attraction, have become the targets of such bans due to their view of same-sex attraction as sinful.
This is the root problem for adherents of the new affirmative psychiatry. A few quacks hardly merit the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry making policy statements on the need to end the practice of “conversion therapy.” A whole sector of counselors who question, or outright reject, their first principle that a person’s sexual self-identification is absolute and undeniable, on the other hand, demand answering. All the more so when those religious counselors are still, to the chagrin of modern man, still taken seriously in certain circles. This is what Christian counselors represent; when opponents say Tingley v. Ferguson is a case of religion versus LGBTQ+ rights, believe them.
This split has not shaped the field of psychiatry for more than a few decades. Long before it was normal for a man to go to a therapist with his identity questions, it was normal for him to go to a priest. Indeed, a comparatively small fraction of history has seen mental problems treated by licensed technicians rather than men of the cloth. But while much has changed since a religious answer to a mental ailment was considered as serious or more so than a scientific one, the most radical shift has occurred even more recently. Freud and other early clinical psychologists sought to cure their patients of certain neuroses, of which homosexuality and transsexuality were considered two until the 1970s; the new psychiatric approach, shown in heightened terms with the practice of hormone replacement “therapy” for gender-confused youth, has replaced the implicit morality of just a few decades ago. The ailment itself is no longer even called an ailment; instead, it is celebrated.
What has changed in the world of soul-healing is merely the substance of these moral imperatives. The new psychiatry has a new morality. It is followed with the same religious fervor as any of the older ones. It has new quacks, too, with new extreme cures that are already far more common than exorcisms and electroshock therapy. This new morality calls it right and good to help a man cut off his manhood to conform his body to the world inside his head.
What matters, then, is not so much the purported effectiveness or failure of gay conversion therapy, which deserves its own separate discussion. What matters, for the Supreme Court and Christian counselors, is an understanding that what is really at stake is far from a simple legal affirmation of what every serious counselor already knows. It is Christian counsel which is on trial, and every sort of healthy morality which goes with it.
The post The Real Problem with Gay Conversion Therapy appeared first on The American Conservative.
Both Muslim and Israeli hostility are squeezing out the Christian community in Christ’s own homeland.
In the 2,023 years (give or take) since the birth of Jesus Christ, His hometown of Bethlehem has grown from a sleepy village to a city of 30,000 souls. It is situated in the south of the West Bank region and is governed by the Palestinian Authority. In the 1920s, Christians accounted for about 80 percent of Bethlehem’s population; today, they’re just 20 percent.
It’s not just Bethlehem, either. At the turn of the last century, roughly 10 percent of Palestinians were Christian, including about 25 percent of Jerusalem. Today, Christians comprise about 1 percent of the population of Palestine.
If current trends continue, Christ’s followers will have vanished from His homeland by A.D. 2100. But why?
The Israeli government and pro-Israel sources will place the blame squarely on the shoulders of Palestinian Muslims. And it’s true, of course, that in Palestine, as in every Middle-Eastern country, militant Islamists target Arab Christians. But that’s not the main reason why 90 percent of Palestine’s Christians have gone into exile.
According to a 2017 study by Dar al-Kalima University (a secular college led by a Protestant minister), only 2 percent of Palestinian Christians cited “Muslim religious conservatism” as a reason to emigrate. By far the most common complaint was “the pressure of Israeli occupation.” Researchers found that “ongoing constraints, discriminatory policies, arbitrary arrests,” and “confiscation of lands” have led to a “despairing situation where they can no longer perceive a future for their offspring or for themselves.”
Put it this way. Earlier this year, the Israeli government declared that fewer than 2,000 worshippers would be allowed to celebrate Orthodox Easter at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. By contrast, in previous years, 10,000 worshippers would pack themselves into the pews. This is part of a growing trend, whereby the State of Israel forcibly prevents Christians—both natives and pilgrims—from practicing their faith. They will always cite “security concerns,” though of course the “concern” is never explained. The Israeli police will simply show up, armed to the teeth, and start turning away worshippers after a certain (miniscule) quota is met.
Or take the tragic case of Shireen Abu Aqla.
Abu Aqla was a reporter for Al-Jazeera. She was also a member of the Melkite Greek Catholic Church. Last year, while covering a raid on the West Bank—and while wearing a vest with the word “PRESS” emblazoned on the front and back—she was shot by Israeli soldiers. Abu Aqla’s body was prepared for burial at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Jerusalem. Just hours before the funeral, the institution was raided by Israeli police. Patients were knocked off their beds, while medical staff suffered burns from stun grenades. After the coffin was carried out of the hospital, officers attacked Abu Aqla’s pallbearers with batons. Mourners were shot with rubber bullets for displaying the Palestinian flag.
An investigation by CNN concluded that Abu Aqla was “shot dead in a targeted attack by Israeli forces.” The United Nations’ Human Rights Office concurred. A joint statement by the Orthodox and Catholic patriarchs of Jerusalem condemned the Israeli police not only for their “disproportionate use of force” but also for “disrespecting the Church” and violating “the fundamental human right of freedom of religion” by trying to disrupt Abu Aqla’s funeral.
Of course, the Israelis denied everything. A government spokesman pointed out that “journalist are killed around the world every week, without the same global reaction” and claimed that the international furor over Abu Aqla’s death was evidence of an “antisemitic double standard.” The Jerusalem Post called CNN’s report an “anti-Israel hit job.” Yet Tel Aviv has yet to provide a shred of evidence proving their innocence.
When Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination of dissident journalist named Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, President Donald Trump notoriously all but defended the Saudis. (“If you’re going to look at Saudi Arabia, look at Iran, look at other countries,” he said.) Yet President Joe Biden has refused to meet with Abu Aqla’s family, and his administration has no plans to censure the Israeli government. This is even more disturbing given that Abu Aqla was an American citizen.
This is why Palestinian Christians are throwing in the towel. They know that the Israeli government has no respect for their rights, either as individuals or as religious minorities. And they know that the United States—the so-called leader of the free world—will happily turn a blind eye when Tel Aviv abuses Arab Christians, even if they happen to be dual Palestinian/American citizens.
And it gets worse. When Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power last year, he became the first Israeli leader to officially promote the expansion of illegal Jewish “settlements” in the West Bank. For decades, Israelis have been encroaching on the Palestinian Authority’s territory. They have evicted Arab residents and cut off their access to public utilities like water and electricity. In the past, Tel Aviv would have insisted that these outposts were lawful while denying that the State of Israel officially supported the “settlers.” Today, Netanyahu not only acknowledges the colonization of the West Bank, but has made it official government policy.
Remember, these are the exact policies that Christians blame for their decision to leave Palestine. And, as the kids would say, that’s not a bug; it’s a feature. Netanyahu returned to power this past December by allying himself with religious Zionist and anti-Arab parties. Their stated goal is to expand Israel’s borders as widely as possible, driving all non-Jews out of their homes in the process.
One would expect conservatives, the advocates of the religious freedom protected in the First Amendment, to embrace a more balanced position on Israel. Yet only Kentucky’s Senator Rand Paul and Vivek Ramaswamy, alone among the GOP’s national figures, have dared to suggest that we reduce the amount of aid we give to Israel even slightly. When Netanyahu visited the United States earlier this month, he was received warmly—and not only by Biden, but also by conservative darlings like Elon Musk.
Americans of every creed should be outraged by Israel’s treatment of its Arab neighbors. The fact that a foreign government can kill a U.S. citizen—a journalist, no less!—without our State Department so much as wagging its finger should make our blood run cold. Yet Christians have a special reason to stand in solidarity with Palestine. The Israeli government clearly intends to stamp out the Christian faith in Christ’s own homeland. They’ve made this abundantly clear by their efforts to purge Arab Christians from the region and to prevent worshippers from visiting Israel’s churches.
I doubt anything will change anytime soon, but American Christians have a duty to our Palestinian brothers and sisters. If Netanyahu and his allies get their way, they will disappear from the region within the next century. Without our help, they don’t stand a chance.
The post Who Will Stand for Palestinian Christians? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Contra Matthew McManus’s latest, conservatism is not necessarily a force of arbitrary hierarchy and oppression.
The Political Right and Equality: Turning the Tide of Egalitarian Modernity, by Matthew McManus. Routledge, 265 pages
In a recent New York Times op-ed, the progressive writer and activist Naomi Klein warned against the “supremacist values” that “pose the greatest threats to our societies.” Not white-supremacist values, mind you, but supremacist values simpliciter. It’s an amusing, and revealing, choice of phrasing. Amusing, because all “values” as such imply valuation or grading and thus admit the possibility of supremacy: good, better, best. And revealing, because Klein’s construction shows how the most committed egalitarians can’t escape the problems of rank and distinction, even at the level of language. To condemn certain values for being supremacist, after all, suggests that there are other values that are, well, better.
The political scientist Matthew McManus is keenly aware of these contradictions. Early on in his important new book, The Political Right and Equality, the University of Michigan political scientist and self-described liberal socialist concedes how some of the most celebrated figures in the radical tradition exploited slaves (Jefferson) or justified imperialism (John Stuart Mill), even as they proclaimed the fundamental equality of humankind. For McManus, though, these were merely accidental failings, not suggestive of deeper flaws in the tradition he celebrates. Liberals who take seriously their own ideals, he thinks, are bound to become socialists—whereas equality is and will remain a permanent stumbling block for the right.
The author’s central argument is that the modernist quest for equality is the thing that called forth the right as a distinct movement or sensibility in Western societies, where hierarchical social orders were once simply taken for granted. All conservatism, one way or another, boils down to a yearning to restore the edifice of hierarchy that was shattered by the birth of the modern. The “political right,” he declares, “is simply more comfortable with the idea that people are unequal, and so should be treated unequally.”
The opposite idea—that human beings are equal by nature and therefore deserving of equal rights and equal access to political institutions—is for McManus a modernist invention, albeit one faintly prefigured in biblical religion. Likewise—and here McManus makes his most interesting moves—conservatism is a modernist phenomenon, notwithstanding the right’s claims to ancient roots: When an Aristotle described an organically hierarchical social order, he was simply describing the classical world as it was, whereas a conservative pining for such an order in A.D. 2023, and citing Aristotle for support, is already conceding that some rupture has taken place, one he struggles to “get back behind of.”
Never mind 2023, this was already the case for, say, a Juan Donoso Cortés (a name only referenced once in McManus’s text): The brilliant reactionary Spanish diplomat, papal adviser, and social commentator no longer believed that right order would or could reconstitute itself over and against modernity’s pressures, not without the application of a reactionary counterpressure that would have been alien to the Christian statesmen of an earlier age.
It is this sense of tragic loss that lends conservatism its aesthetic gravity and, for McManus, generates the movement’s most “exciting” literary contributions, especially in the works of figures like Fyodor Dostoevsky and T.S. Eliot. But in the realm of concrete politics, especially in the Anglosphere, wrestling with modernity while pining for organic hierarchy makes for a self-contradictory posture: For example, Edmund Burke’s unbending defense of property, as McManus rightly notes, wasn’t exactly a conservative project, not when capitalism was revolutionizing property relations, enclosing the commons, and brutally dislocating the settled order of things.
That contradictory posture is more or less what mainstream Anglophone conservatism has amounted to for a very long time. The movement’s protagonists lament the demise of meaning and belonging and “little platoons,” while upholding grossly unjust inequalities in economic power that only accelerate the loss. There has always been an ugly alternative path for the right, of course: one that would simply ratify inequality on the basis of racial and/or I.Q.-based hierarchies, or else seek to reconstitute lost organic social order on the basis of racial solidarity, shifting the blame for antagonisms inherent to modern economic relations to ethnic minorities, most notably the Jews. Much of McManus’s book is devoted to exploring these darker paths.
Is there a third way? I should hope so. It would involve, as I have repeatedly argued in these pages, a politics devoted to taming hierarchies within the framework of the common good. What would be distinctly conservative about such a politics is the recognition, amply borne out by the experience of the bloody 20th century, that attempts to foist total equality on human societies are bound to yield new tyrannies, lorded over by hierarchies made all the more intolerant of dissent by their faith that they have abolished hierarchy once and for all. Likewise, in conservative (and, indeed, Catholic) fashion, such a politics would respect various “estates”—family, church, labor unions, clubs, etc.—whose governance must be left to themselves within a broadly egalitarian order.
At the same time, such a politics would absolutely reject racial hierarchies as artificial and critique economic inequality as the result not of natural or organic aristocracy, but mainly of political choices—choices that can be altered. The classical and Christian ideal of morally conditioning elites to be “better” elites would still have some utility, but the more pertinent lever would be power: the application of law to strengthen the hand of workers and the poor relative to those at the top.
Indeed, this was how the Catholic Church came to reckon with the problem of inequality in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, a tradition that McManus sadly elides, beyond vaguely gesturing that Christianity carries some worthwhile egalitarian impulses. Even so, The Political Right and Equality deserves serious engagement from its polemical targets.
The post Egalitarian Conservatism? Yes, We Can appeared first on The American Conservative.
An old (and famous) sycamore tree that stood next to the Hadrian’s Wall in England for hundreds of years was deliberately felled in an act of mindless savagery. A 16-year-old boy and a 60-year-old man have been arrested in connection with the vandalism. No other information about them and their motivations were given; one can only imagine why.
I am not sure why this sort of thing bothers me so much, more even than actual human suffering at times; perhaps because any mindless savagery, from toppling statues to burning churches and libraries to trophy hunting and felling trees should hurt a reactionary. Perhaps because I am just a historian. Men often suffer due to social causes, but men mostly suffer due to consequences of their choices. Trees, on the other hand, are different. (As are statues.) And it is our duty to protect them.
The ancients would have known and attributed this savagery and madness to demons or curses from the vengeful older gods. Normal people don’t just randomly get up in the middle of the night to fell centuries-old trees. For that matter, we don’t just randomly riot, or loot, or commit arson, or vandalize. Or topple ancient statues and desecrate memorials.
As Oxford classicist Armand D’Angour reminded us, there’s something ancient and spirited about trees; failure to save them brings down the wrath of the gods.
Erysichthon, King of Thessaly, who impiously orders the sacred grove of Demeter (Roman Ceres), goddess of the harvest, to be cut down. When his retainers refuse to do so, Erysichthon takes an axe and chops it down himself. The dying dryad of the grove lays a curse on him, whereupon Ceres punishes him with insatiable hunger. Having sold all his possessions in his desperate need for food, Erysichthon eventually sells his own daughter and has her procure food for him. But the more he eats, the more he is tormented by hunger, and after all his possessions are exhausted he gruesomely resorts to eating his own body.
A strong metaphor for the state of our civilization. But disorder is, at the end of the day, not just a legal, but a spiritual issue. Most civilized people, for the most part, are conservative and law-abiding by instinct. But some are not. With the increasing paganization of society, older curses are coming back. A pagan world will eventually need pagan punishments. This may be such a time.
As Treebeard said, “They come with fire, they come with axes! Gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning! Destroyers and usurpers! Curse them!”
The post Orcs Are Roaming Freely appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: A new contestant emerges in the competition to define the post-Trump Right.
On the night of September 12, in the warm, humid, teeming basement of a trendy Mexican restaurant off D.C.’s luxe Logan Circle, the American Institute for Economic Research welcomed its latest project to the world: FUSION, a new online magazine edited by Samuel Goldman and published by AIER’s president, William Ruger.
Ruger and Goldman’s “fusionist” vision was created with this prime issue in mind: seeking common ground between national conservatives, the new right, libertarians, postliberals, and traditionalists is the key to ensuring the preservation of America’s traditions of liberty and freedom in an ever-changing world.
These groups may disagree on issues ranging from the foreign policy to the gay rights movement to Donald Trump’s place in politics, but, Goldman and Ruger argue, all conservatives’ mission remains essentially the same: to “stand athwart history, yelling stop,” to borrow a phrase from the flagship publication of the old conservative fusionism.
“There is a core of shared commitment to constitutional government and ordered rule among us,” Goldman commented to The American Conservative, asserting that conservatives “agree on enough things enough of the time.”
“The battle of ideas is a good thing,” said Ruger, who is a board member of the American Ideas Institute, which publishes TAC.
In his first essay for FUSION, Ruger argued that “contrary to claims that we live in some libertarian utopia…individual freedom has been eroded in domain after domain of our lives. We have a serious gap between the soaring rhetoric of freedom around us from the reality we face today.”
In attendance was Dan McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Modern Age and editor-at-large of The American Conservative, who was enthusiastic about this experiment in coalition-building.
“I think the challenge they’re facing is that people view fusionism as a mix of libertarianism and traditionalism. But within the libertarian movement itself, a lot of libertarian institutions are under pressure from the left to exclude all conservatives, and especially all populist and Trumpian conservatives,” said McCarthy. “But FUSION doesn’t seem to be doing that.”
“The question is can you do that and also keep more left-wing libertarians involved as well,” he added. “That’s totally appropriate, but there does come a point when you have to ask yourself whether we are including people in our coalition who want to censor half of our coalition?”
FUSION will publish a monthly long-form essay and occasional shorter pieces.
The post Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Church won’t survive another Covid scare.
It’s happening again. The rumblings of a new Covid-19 strain hitting the country are causing a growing number of Americans to don their N95 masks, stock up on supplies (toilet paper!), and call for social distancing and quarantine procedures for the infected. Setting an example for his constituents, President Joe Biden is, sometimes, wearing his mask at the public events he attends. And the CDC has leapt into action, recommending that all Americans, including infants less than a year old, take yet another booster of the Covid vaccine. This has even become a requirement for American citizenship.
It seems only a matter of time before more organizations enforce various mask and vaccine mandates, media platforms censor dissident views of the issue, and state governments institute universal mail-in ballots next year. And, it is fair to assume that most people will go along with all of it—again. The hysteria of 2020 for the first outbreaks of Covid wasn’t designed to teach the American people anything, or even keep them safe; rather, it conditioned and primed them to mobilize for the next disaster.
Fortunately, members of Team Reality—that brave group of people who resisted joining the Covid cult—are taking precautions against the precautions. For instance, Governor Greg Abbot of Texas signed off on a law that prohibits “mask vaccine, and shutdown mandates” at public institutions. And former President Donald Trump has told his supporters not to comply with the coming Covid dictates. They understand that with so many challenges confronting that people today, another bout of Covid hysteria will devastate the country beyond repair.
So what are churches doing about all this?
After all, few institutions have suffered more from the botched Covid response than Christian churches. Already, attendance was declining steadily, but the drop became precipitous after churches shut down and stopped hosting services for so many months in 2020. Even when they reopened, significantly fewer people returned. Evidently, many regular church attenders decided to stay home on Sundays permanently, or they joined the new cults of the time and lit candles for St. Fauci and St. George Floyd.
I remember when this all happened. The churches closed during Lent and stayed that way during Eastertide. My wife gave birth to our youngest daughter at the beginning of April, when the country was officially locked down for 30 days. While sitting with her sleeping on my lap, I would watch Bishop Barron celebrate Mass on my laptop (I figured that since his documentaries were so good, maybe his live-streamed Mass would be good too). Since it didn’t include the Eucharistic liturgy, the whole thing was only about 20 minutes long—four readings, some prayers, and a sermon.
I did this for a few Sundays before giving up. It just felt empty. Eventually, some churches, starting with a local Traditional Latin Mass parish, reopened, and I could take my family to church on Sundays again. Another bonus with the parish was that they didn’t require us to wear masks and were actually willing to baptize my child. As for the other, less traditional parishes, the pastors and church ladies continued to aggressively demand that everyone, young or old, mask their faces, sanitize their hands before receiving Communion, and keep a distance from other families—or better yet, just stay home since the bishop granted another dispensation. When it came to Covid, they were truly a church militant.
It took more than a year before churches relaxed their standards and let attendees breathe freely again and actually shake the hands of their neighbors in the pews—though I’m still occasionally denied handshakes during the sign of peace by people who see their Christian brothers and sisters as vectors of disease. Now, more than three years later, most practicing Christians have deliberately forgotten (more accurately, furiously memory-holed) the Covid lockdowns.
This collective “water under the bridge” mentality presents two major problems. First, it makes it all the more likely that believers will fall for the same gaslighting tactics again. They will again wear the masks, which do nothing but serve as symbols that stoke fear. They will again stop all church services and ceremonies, ignorant of how demoralizing this is for everyone. They will again wrongly equate anti-social actions with charity, never minding how contradictory this is to a faith that prioritizes spiritual concerns over materials ones. In short, they will make the same mistakes again, once the same fear-mongering ramps up.
This leads to a much more serious problem, particularly for Christians: No one has apologized for anything. When secular leaders used Covid to turn liberal democracies into totalitarian police states, religious leaders pushing back were nowhere to be found. Rather, most of them actively denied their flocks the much-needed spiritual sustenance that could have helped restore sanity and stability to the world. When the mandates were handed down, most pastors supported them, clearly more motivated by retaining their nonprofit status and government contracts than protecting their flocks.
On a more personal level, I can recall the indignities my loved ones and I suffered. The priests and church ladies who help them became hostile to us during Covid. Few people experienced this worse than my elderly father. As he hobbled up with his cane to the altar to receive Communion, he found himself loudly rebuffed by the priest, humiliated in front of the whole congregation, and told to go sit back down, all because he didn’t stop to sanitize his hands before stepping up. This kind of thing happened frequently. I remember a shrill church lady who kicked me out of the confession line because I didn’t have a mask, and this in 2021. I have come to forgive this kind of thing—“They know not what they do”—but many understandably haven’t.
For even now, hardly any of these priests, church ladies, or other “good Christians” have ever said sorry. If anything, they pretend like they couldn’t have known any better and were thus justified in taking an adversarial stance—an argument famously articulated in Emily Oster’s “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty.” They might not have saved lives, but that was the intention, and this somehow makes up for the souls that were lost. And really, who wants to talk about Covid anymore?
As it turns out, the same people who profited from the pandemic three years ago want to talk about it. One can view this lousy sequel to the pandemic as a punishment from God that will destroy what’s left of His Church, or an opportunity for the faithful to repent, heal, and fight back against the darkness. For the people who’ve left the faith driven away by Covid hysteria, nothing less than a full repudiation and conversion will suffice. The people who pushed them away need to remember that God is on the side of those who fight injustice and lies. This is a chance for them to be on that side and to do some much needed penance.
The post Covid and the Gates of Hell appeared first on The American Conservative.
Perhaps the transition from a positive to neutral world was inevitable, but an evangelical elite was distinctly ill-equipped to arrest that transition, too.
Like most Americans this week, I have been thinking about 9/11. Twenty-two years is a long time, and twenty-two anniversaries give a lot of angles from which to look at something, including the time itself that has passed. In particular, I’ve found myself thinking about George W. Bush. Or rather, the Bush era, which seems now almost a foreign country. There are all the years between then and now, and what we know came after the president said “I can hear you!” at Ground Zero—the Iraq invasion, the Patriot Act, decades of sandy boots and more broken bodies—gives a grim cast to memory, but that first pitch at Yankee Stadium (“U.S.A.”), the yellow ribbon magnet on the family minivan, George and Laura smiling from a card on the refrigerator, all still sit Kodak-warm in recollection. We were American evangelicals and George W. Bush was our president.
Somewhere in the Bush era, from 9/11 to the Lehman Brothers’s bankruptcy, was a highwater mark of evangelical ease and confidence in this country. The mainlines had given up shepherding the people, and the born again were ready to step up in a crisis. Bioethics debates played out on NPR. Bush and Gingrich read Marvin Olasky. I recall picking a fight in Sunday school with a kid who said his parents supported John Kerry. Didn’t he, a child like me, care about abortion? The New Atheists, in their fear and contempt, reified by their opposition the sense that this was not just a Christian country historically but an evangelical country now. Yes, many evangelicals were educating at home or starting private schools, skeptical that an untrained child can be salt and light in what amounts to a government prison. A lot still feared the Man. But, at the same time, our guy was in the White House. Some of us were insiders. It felt good.
Today, the mood is dark and evangelical America is divided. There are a few very real theological issues at stake—e.g., the imago Dei as it informs sexuality and reproduction, nature and grace and the role of the state, Darwin and the genres of Genesis—but the questions are often, too often, only incidental to the division. Evangelicals are divided, fundamentally, by political sensibility and posture to American culture and “progress,” and they tend to find the theology that fits the camp they’re comfortable in, conservative or liberal. What happens when your elites “mainline,” as we might put it, while the pastors and people who fill pews of your not-mainline churches stay the same? We are running the experiment; we saw interesting preliminary results in 2016.
How did we get here? The Bush administration was, in retrospect, a disastrous failure. We, the evangelicals, had our guy, a man who respected us, who sounded like us, who had shared his testimony. And compassionate conservatism didn’t happen, and the mission wasn’t accomplished after all, and the surveillance state swallowed up the world. But the Bush administration also made our elites, the evangelical elites, feel like they had a seat at the big kid table, and that they should have one, that they belonged, as evangelicals. And many conservatives celebrated the evangelicals who were part of the Obama world, because they were supposed to be there. Then came Obergefell.
Readers familiar with evangelical America’s discussions of itself will recognize in this hasty sketch something of Aaron Renn’s “neutral world.” Renn argues that between 1994 and 2014, public Christianity shifted from a default background of American civic life, privileged and high status, to “a valid option within a pluralistic public square.” By his reckoning we are nine years into a negative world for Christianity, in which “subscribing to Christian moral views or violating the secular moral order brings negative consequences.” I find Renn’s framework helpful, and so cite it here, but also mean to suggest more on top of it. Evangelicalism, a tent made to describe a low-church Protestantism that broke from or never joined the liberalizing mainline establishment, has been a victim of its own success. The dog caught a car in the Bush administration, but didn’t know how to drive.
Perhaps the transition from a positive to neutral world was inevitable, with secularizing forces and demographic changes making multiculturalism, rather than toleration, the only settlement for public Christianity possible. But an evangelical elite was distinctly ill-equipped to arrest that transition, too. Members of congregationalist churches and small splinter denominations, the default evangelical political posture—political in the broad sense of institution building and participation—is countercultural, positioned in reference to a pre-existing establishment. In a sense, we were inclined to choose a neutral world on our own. And the divide the evangelical world faces today, inexactly mirroring the polarization of the country as a whole, comes from the two options a community has when it will not steer the ship: assimilation or reaction.
After the social revolutions of the Obama years, after the failure of apparent triumph in the Bush era, it should be little wonder that Donald Trump’s nakedly transactional approach to politics—“my evangelicals”—appealed so broadly. It has a certain honesty to it. And the present, related hysteria from evangelical elites about “Christian nationalism” should be no surprise either. For those who chose assimilation, it is a transparent threat to their own position, totally opposed to their sensibilities. For those who have withdrawn from national politics, it seems to threaten the purity of their communities. A prophetic voice, a pilgrim exit, these have been the tools of evangelical cultural engagement, not the governing and leadership of the old mainline establishment.
But the positive world was real; America has had a public Christianity before: Not just Abraham Lincoln’s Thanksgiving proclamation, but Dwight D. Eisenhower, and, yes, in its own inadequate way, George W. Bush. And now, all these years later, with little left to lose, it occurs to some evangelical Americans that perhaps we can again.
The post We Were Eight Years in Power appeared first on The American Conservative.
In the supposed mass graves of residential schools, no bodies have been found.
So much for Canada’s mass graves. Two years ago, ground-penetrating radar supposedly discovered mass burial sites near several so-called residential schools for indigenous children funded by the Canadian government and operated by churches (often Catholic ones) from the late 19th century to the late 20th century. The “discovery” prompted a good old-fashioned racial reckoning. You know, the kind necessitating arson and wanton destruction.
In response to the radar findings, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned the apparent mass murder (of kids!). Dozens of Canadian churches, including many that served indigenous communities, were burned to the ground by enraged activists—acts Trudeau described as “understandable,” given the enormity of the racist crimes. The executive director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Union, Harsha Walia, brayed for more, tweeting, “Burn it all down!”
Now, two years later, we learn that “a series of recent excavations at suspected sites has turned up no human remains,” as the New York Post reported over the weekend. The Pine Creek First Nation dug up fourteen sites near a residential school in Manitoba over the summer, and turned up zilch. As Spiked noted, this latest excavation is only the latest among several similar digs at former residential-school sites, including the Mohawk School in Brantford, the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School in Nova Scotia, the Charles Camsell Hospital in Edmonton, and the Kuper Island Residential School in British Columbia. All have turned up exactly zero human remains.
Other sites almost certainly hold bodies, but these aren’t mass graves of murdered children. Remember the prime minister’s photo-op that showed him holding a teddy bear near a residential school in Cowessess First Nation? The local chief has made clear that that site merely contained unmarked graves, as less-than-sturdy grave markers at the local Catholic cemetery gradually deteriorated under weather.
There is no denying that some indigenous children were mistreated in residential schools. But the mass murders and mass burials used to justify attacking churches in general and the Canadian Catholic Church in particular were quite literally a piece of agitprop mythology.
Yet amid the mass-graves fever, many Canadian journalists and scholars, including men and women of the left, found themselves ostracized or even out of a job for daring to question the mythology. The Mount Royal University in Calgary, for example, fired the progressive political scientist Frances Widdowson for promoting anti-indigenous views (her real “crime” was questioning the NGO-advocacy industrial complex that, in her view, hinders real development for the community by ginning up fake grievances). The few reporters who did real digging came under severe fire, as Terry Glavin documented for Canada’s National Post.
Why did this madness take such deep roots in Canada? Writing for Compact, the progressive anthropologist Kathleen Lowrey has argued that harping on nonexistent or massively exaggerated historical crimes allows Canada’s liberal ruling class to legitimate an economic status quo that has left working- and middle-class Canadians poorer and more miserable than any time since the postwar era. If vast swaths of Canadian society can be written off as the sons and daughters of historical mass murderers, then extraction and austerity—and the crushing of those who opposed extra-draconian Covid policies—could be justified.
As Lowrey wrote:
The real lesson being delivered is that most Canadians have had it far too good for far too long, and deserve much less than they have got right now. Employment? Bah. The right to squeak about loss of employment? Humbug. A voice in public policy making? Pshaw. The right to protest or even to have a bank account? Um, honk-honk?
But I think another explanation for the mass-graves hysteria is naked anti-Catholic bigotry. Against a Canadian medical system that increasingly encourages ailing and disabled people to avail themselves of suicide-by-doctor, sometimes in a less-than-voluntary way, there stands one institution, the Roman church. But what if that institution itself were guilty of mass murdering and mass-burying children? Then its credibility in the public square would be shot, that’s what.
Call this what it is: an anti-Catholic blood libel.
The post Canada’s Anti-Catholic Blood Libel appeared first on The American Conservative.
The 2023 Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting rejected women pastors—but the fight is not over.
As goes the Southern Baptist Convention, so goes America. The SBC is the country’s largest Protestant denomination, home to over 13 million members in over 47,000 churches. The sheer size of the SBC means that Southern Baptists not only sit at the center of theological conservatism in the nation. They are also a formidable political coalition. In 2016, Donald Trump won the presidential election with approximately four out of five “white evangelicals” lending him their votes—many of these supplied by rank-and-file SBC pew fillers.
If you were part of a progressive political cabal intent on silencing the echoes of the “Moral Majority” and nudging Republicans to the left, the SBC presents a prime target. Get the SBC to compromise on key cultural issues of the day—critical race theory, traditional marriage—and you can leverage that to move them away from supporting conservative politicians and causes.
“Just focus on the gospel,” cry many current Baptist leaders. It doesn’t matter if the SBC isn’t interested in politics, because politics is interested in the SBC. And it appears that liberal actors inside and outside of the tent may have found their skeleton key, one that can finally make the SBC go the way of the Mainline Protestant denominations in America, the way of rainbow/trans flags, drag queen acts as “praise and worship,” and pastors proclaiming “abortion is an act of love” while wearing a Planned Parenthood stole.
What could yield such a drastic departure from the historic, orthodox, confessional commitments of the Southern Baptist Convention? A journey of a thousand miles begins with a tiny step. For the SBC, the descent begins with this one: affirming women pastors.
If the SBC won’t hold the line on male-only ordination, it is effectively cutting the theological and cultural brakes. Once that line is severed, the SBC will embark down the undefeated slippery slope of worldly accommodation. As research from 9Marks (a mostly conservative organization committed to church health) and The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (the main complementarian think tank in the evangelical world) shows, every gay-affirming denomination, seminary, or church also embraces women’s ordination.
Egalitarian-affirming pastors in the SBC labor under the misguided notion that the revolution will stop exactly where it benefits us most, thank you. But revolutions don’t work like that. If they start down this path, why wouldn’t the SBC ultimately go the way of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the denominational home of the “abortion is an act of love” female pastor quoted above?
That is where the fight is in the SBC today. At the recent annual meeting in New Orleans in June, the two sides faced off, one side attempting to preserve and enforce the SBC’s clearly stated commitment to male-only pastors, the other side angling to open up the Pandora’s box of women’s ordination. Whatever the SBC finally decides on this issue will echo throughout America and the world.
Enter David and Goliath.
In late spring of 2022, Mike Law Jr. sat in his office in his modest SBC church in Northern Virginia. Serving as the senior pastor of Arlington Baptist Church, Law was largely content with his lot as the shepherd of a 100-person flock. Yet something bothered him. Within a five-mile radius of his congregation, he had noticed five SBC churches with female pastors on staff. Such a practice stood in direct opposition to the SBC’s confession of faith, the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, which states, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor/elder/overseer is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.”
Law decided to take action. Investigative journalist Megan Basham summarizes how everything started in her excellent writeup for the online journal American Reformer, “Mr. Smith Goes to the Convention”:
He sent an email to the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention… He began with a chipper greeting introducing himself and his congregation, followed by a straightforward question: Is a church that has a woman serving as pastor deemed to be in friendly cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention? He finished by thanking the committee for its service and said he looked forward to their answer. He would never get one.
Eventually, Law heard directly from Jonathan Howe, vice president of communications for the SBC’s executive committee, informing him that such a determination was made by the credentials committee. (Baptists do love their committees.) The credentials committee replied: “I believe your question is in reference to Saddleback Church.” Therefore, the committee was “unable to give a response.”
What did Saddleback have to do with a small church in Northern Virginia? Quite a bit. Across the country in sunny California, Goliath was stirring.
Saddleback is what’s known as a “mega-church,” boasting over 23,000 members across six campuses and led by Rick Warren, author of the best-selling book The Purpose Driven Life.
While it has undertaken efforts to downplay its affiliation with the SBC over the years, as of 2022, Saddleback was still officially a part of the convention. But that didn’t stop Warren from ordaining three women the year prior, something that caught the eye of the Washington Post: “Saddleback Church, one of the largest churches in the Southern Baptist Convention and home to influential pastor Rick Warren, ordained three women as staff pastors this past weekend… ‘Yesterday was a historic night for Saddleback Church in many ways!’ the Southern California mega-church’s Facebook page announced on Saturday. ‘We ordained our first three women pastors, Liz Puffer, Cynthia Petty, and Katie Edwards!’”
This move didn’t go unnoticed by rank-and-file SBC pastors, either. At the annual meeting in 2021, a motion was made to instruct the credentials committee to “disfellowship” Saddleback for their flagrant violation of the Baptist Faith & Message 2000. The credentials committee set up a report to the messengers in 2022—the same year that Law decided to force the question of women pastors by proposing an amendment to the SBC’s constitution to clarify that men, and only men, can serve as pastors.
In a remarkable display of unequal weights and measures, Warren was given an unprecedented opportunity to command a microphone during the 2022 convention to make his case for Saddleback. At the same time, Law was pressured, even harassed, by Howe to drop his amendment.
Ultimately, Law’s amendment was referred to the executive committee and the vote on Saddleback’s ouster was punted to 2023.
Over the next year, the modern-day David and Goliath story developed. On one side was Law, the unassuming pastor of a small local church. On the other side was a multi-millionaire mega-church pastor who rubs shoulders with the Davos crowd and claims to have trained over 1 million pastors, “more than all the [SBC] seminaries put together.”
The extra time turned out to be a boon for Law. He spent the fall and spring taking the fight directly to the people. He drafted a letter in August 2022 calling for his fellow SBC pastors to “dispel the confusion in our Convention and to keep our long-held unity by recommending this amendment to the SBC Constitution at the 2023 annual meeting.” It ultimately garnered over 2,200 signatures. He also launched a website to explain the purpose of the amendment.
But while David collected his five stones of grassroots support, Goliath also sharpened his spear. In February 2023, the SBC executive committee handed down its decision on Saddleback and four other churches under review, determining that they were no longer in “friendly cooperation” with the convention. According to the SBC rules, each church would have the chance to contest the ruling at the 2023 annual meeting before the assembled SBC messengers.
Warren made it clear he had no intention of taking this lying down. In “An open letter to all Southern Baptists,” Warren rejected “the idea that Southern Baptists who disagree [on ordaining women pastors] are an existential threat to our convention and not true Baptists.” He said his church was challenging the ruling “not for ourselves, but for the future and nature of the SBC, which hangs in the balance.”
The lines were drawn. Come June 2023, in New Orleans, the messengers would vote on whether or not to uphold Saddleback’s disfellowship. And the Law amendment? The decision on whether or not an up-or-down vote would come before the messengers lay in the hands of the executive committee—and their ruling wouldn’t come until the morning before the convention officially started.
In the fog of war, it is often hard to pinpoint any single strategic move that brings about the turning of the tide. But in the run-up to the SBC meeting in June, there was an “October surprise” that just may have forced the executive committee’s hand.
On June 10, American Reformer dropped an explosive piece: “How Many Female Pastors Are In The SBC?” The product of hundreds of hours of research by lay members in a local SBC church, the article made a claim that could not be ignored:
The SBC officially lists 47,614 SBC churches. Of these 47,614 churches, around 22,000 have websites publicly listed on the searchable SBC database… Our sample size of randomly selected churches was 3,847 churches. Within this sample we discovered 99 SBC churches with female pastors and a total of 149 female pastors serving across these 99 churches… When our team’s numbers are extrapolated to the entire Convention of 47,614 churches, we can conclude that there are approximately 1,844 female pastors serving in 1,225 SBC churches.
“This is a staggering number,” the article concluded. “It dwarfs the previously known information about female pastors by a factor of ten.”
On the morning of June 11, the executive committee delivered their verdict: The amendment would come up for a vote before the gathered body of messengers—approximately 12,000 this year—but with a recommendation that it was unnecessary and shouldn’t be adopted.
The stage was set. Over the next two days, one of the largest deliberative bodies in the world would take two major votes, one on whether to uphold the decision to disfellowship Saddleback, the other on whether to begin the process of ratifying Law’s amendment (which, as a constitutional amendment, requires affirmation by two-thirds of the messengers over two years).
The Saddleback vote was first. Warren came to the mic and delivered an impassioned final floor speech. “No one is asking any Southern Baptist to change their theology,” he said. “The Baptist Faith and Message is four thousand and thirty-two words. Our church disagrees with only one word. That’s 99.99 percent in agreement. Isn’t that close enough?”
For the Southern Baptists sweating it out in Louisiana, it was not close enough. In an overwhelming vote, the messengers affirmed the decision to disfellowship Saddleback by a final tally of 9,437 (88 percent) to 1,212 (11 percent).
One might reasonably wonder about the sequencing of the votes. Did the SBC platform (those who control the stage, debate, and issues presented to the messengers) hope that by dealing with Saddleback first, it would take the wind out of the sails of the Law amendment? Those of us in New Orleans had to wait one more day to find out.
As the convention moved into its final day, the lines could not be more evident. If the Law amendment prevailed, it would be because the people in the room were willing to pass it over the opposition of their leadership.
Standing ready at the microphone when his moment arrived, Law defended his multi-year effort one last time:
I pastor a church in a county where less than 6 percent of the population are evangelical Christians. Over a year ago, I realized that five Southern Baptist churches within a five-mile radius of my congregation had women serving as pastors, including senior pastors.
When an unbeliever looks for a Southern Baptist Church in my area, we want them to find a church that holds to the Bible’s teaching and our Convention’s beliefs.
In 2000, Dr. Adrian Rogers estimated that there were somewhere between 50 and 70 women serving as pastors. Over the last year I’ve learned there are at least 170. As one pastor recently told us: he knows of over 1,900 churches that have female pastors on their staff.
This issue is bigger than we realized a year ago. Now is not the time for half measures or delay.
Other denominations have failed on this point. Some of them have abandoned the Gospel altogether. Brothers and sisters, we must not stumble here.
Law went on to make two main arguments. First, his amendment would bring much-needed clarity. Second, it would strengthen the SBC and its standards of cooperation. “Brothers and sisters, we are not ashamed of 1 Timothy 2:12 or afraid of what the Bible teaches! We are not ashamed of our God and his Word. We love what God says, and we obey what God says. He is worthy and glorified by our obedience,” he said. (1 Timothy 2:12: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.”)
Sarah Clatworthy, a messenger from LifePoint Baptist Church, stood to defend the Law amendment as well. Her brave and pointed remarks are worth considering in full:
We have seen clearly what the lack of precise clarity on any document can leave the door open to. We must stand our ground and keep the door shut to feminism and liberalism.
In a culture that is increasingly unclear about the roles of men and women, or what a man or woman is, we have to be crystal clear. For those churches who have women serving under the title pastor in any capacity, the constitution should encourage them to change those titles rather than allowing their titles to dictate what the constitution says.
Let those who affirm women in pastoral leadership attend the United Methodist Convention where they will be welcome with open arms. We should leave no room for our daughters and granddaughters in the generations ahead to have confusion on where the SBC stands. Let them know that Scripture is our authority and not the culture.
Her slightly humorous suggestion that the United Methodists would welcome those looking for egalitarian churches was met with applause. As the room clapped, she made a brilliant procedural move. Clatworthy “called the question,” ending debate and forcing the vote, thus giving her what amounted to the last word on the matter (though some additional parliamentary procedure resulted in one more round of speeches, one for and one against).
After the conservatives beat back a last-minute effort to extend time on the debate, the moment of truth arrived. The vote before the messengers was on adding a single sentence to Article III, which begins with the heading: “The Convention will only deem a church to be in friendly cooperation with the Convention, and sympathetic with its purposes and work…which.” The proposed sentence was as follows: “Affirms, appoints, or employs only men as any kind of pastor or elder as qualified by Scripture.”
In a shock to the platform, the people prevailed. The amendment was adopted by such an overwhelming majority that there was no effort to even ask for a recorded vote. Warren was already on his way back to California.
David won the battle, but the war is not over. In the biblical story, David didn’t stop once he killed the giant with his stone. He then proceeded, not very winsomely, to take Goliath’s sword and cut his head off.
Where does the SBC go from here?
The counterstrike commenced even before the SBC concluded business on its final day. In the closing hours of the meeting, a coalition of former SBC presidents (J.D. Greear, James Merritt, Bryant Wright, Steve Gaines, Fred Luter, and Ed Litton) teamed up to offer a motion “to authorize the president to appoint a ‘broadly representative task force’ to study how the Convention should deem churches to be ‘in friendly cooperation on questions of faith and practice’ as written in Article 3 of the SBC Constitution, referring to the statement of faith.”
As most voting messengers had already left the room to pursue a few final hours of freedom and fun in the French Quarter, the motion passed with little debate.
The wording sounds anodyne, but the intention is anything but. The goal of this task force is to nullify the Law amendment, regardless of whether it gets ratified, by moving the fight away from the question about who can be a pastor to what it means to be in “friendly cooperation” with the SBC. In a lengthy, hand-wringing blog post laden with emotionally manipulative language, former SBC president J.D. Greear made it clear that this backdoor was actually a full-frontal assault.
“This amendment forces conformity down to tertiary levels in ways that will both violate local church autonomy and are inconsistent with our past practice,” he wrote. “If we continue down this road, we might become a Convention that spends its time focused on who is in and who is out, instead of on the best ways to reach our communities and glorify Jesus. If you want a harbinger of that, just take a look at Southern Baptist social media feeds right now. Is this what we want our Convention to be about?”
For Greear and the other former presidents backing his play, the answer is no. They don’t want the denomination to “be about” policing doctrinal boundaries. They just want to be about the Great Commission and good vibes. Never mind that the Great Commission charges Christians not only to spread the gospel but also to teach disciples to obey all that Christ has commanded (Matthew 28:20), which includes the clear command that women are not permitted to be pastors (1 Timothy 2:12).
The purpose of the task force is to generate recommendations about what it means for a church to be considered in “friendly cooperation” with the SBC. We can expect these recommendations to include a new interpretation of the “friendly cooperation” clause that does not demand enforced adherence to male-only ordination.
Greear compares the task force to the “Jerusalem Council” we see convened in the Book of Acts. “In Acts 15, the church was at a crisis point as they tried to figure out what gospel unity looked like among churches that disagreed in some secondary matters. And they appointed a group to come up with a solution that seemed good to them and the Holy Spirit. They recognized that the unity of the church was a serious matter, and they wanted to take time to get it right.”
But the will of the messengers was clearly expressed in the vote for the Law amendment. Apparently, Law’s campaign to educate the rank-and-file of the SBC concerning the growth of women pastors in their midst doesn’t count as “taking the time to get it right.”
Greear also appealed to his fellow Southern Baptists to check their intersectional boxes before enforcing a biblical standard. Along with expressing his deep concern about how women are “feeling” after the first passage of the Law amendment, Greear highlighted a letter sent by the National African American Fellowship within the SBC, which argues that “this most recent decision [to disfellowship Saddleback and adopt the Law amendment] is an unnecessary infringement upon the autonomy of the local church” that “may disproportionately impact NAAF affiliated congregations” because many of their “churches assign the title ‘pastor’ to women.”
So where does the SBC go from here? Will the Law amendment receive a second affirmative vote? Will the SBC leaders manage to negate it even if it does? Will intersectionality and “hurt feelings” rule the day, or will the SBC continue to be a people of the Book?
These are open questions, and the answers will impact more than just the SBC. The Law amendment and Saddleback’s ouster generated significant attention within American evangelicalism, even drawing the attention of national news outlets like the New York Times. Christians of all denominational affiliations across the country will keep a watchful eye on what the SBC does over the next year as it prepares to gather again in Indianapolis in 2024. Along with those watching eyes, some praying knees would be welcome as well. Because if the SBC doesn’t hold the line as one of the last theologically conservative bulwarks in our nation, working to hold back the dark, nothing good—or godly—will follow.
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In answer to God’s call to subdue creation: Get a dog.
John Steinbeck’s success writing Dust Bowl fiction and California novels eventually drew the author out east. While living in New York, he continued writing his famous stories about life out west—the settler spirit and the culmination of manifest destiny that was California. Before he knew it, twenty-five years had gone by.
“I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir. I had not heard the speech of America, smelled the grass and trees and sewage, seen its hills and water, its color and quality of light. I knew the changes only from books and newspapers,” Steinbeck wrote. “In short, I was writing of something I did not know about, and it seems to me that in a so-called writer this is criminal.”
So, Steinbeck set off “to try to rediscover this monster land,” in a large, modified truck with a cabin on the back. He brought one companion with him: his dog, a French poodle named Charley. The product of their grand adventure, a 10,000 mile road trip through thirty-eight states, became Steinbeck’s 1962 work, Travels with Charley.
We had to put our family dog down this week. He was a giant Siberian Husky with a stunning red coat and piercing ice blue eyes named Kona. He was the most beautiful dog I’d ever seen.
Kona came to us as a rescue. For the first two years of Kona’s life, his previous owners kept him in a small cement dog run and fed him through a metal slat built into the side of his cage on account of the fact that they believed he was part wolf. We never fully confirmed this was the case, but with Kona’s size, especially his massive head—his muzzle length, the shape of his ears—as well as his giant paws, nearly as big as the palms of my hands, we couldn’t rule it out.
If he had wolf blood coursing through his veins, his temperment never showed it. When my mom and I went to meet Kona for the first time to consider adopting him, I took him for a short walk. He didn’t pull, he stayed right on my heels, looking up at me the entire time with a giant, goofy grin plastered across his giant face as tongue hung out of the side of his mouth. Afterwards, we sat down in the grass. As I petted him, he slowly inched closer to me, eventually putting his massive head in my lap. He was my dog from that moment on.
The next ten years were spent doing exactly what we did on the first day we met. They went by too fast, I’m afraid. Between heading to college and starting off on my own on the opposite coast, I wasn’t there as much as I would have liked. Over the years, nothing made me more homesick than the thought of enjoying family dinners with Kona curled up at my feet.
We love our dogs, and rightfully so. But with the rise of the “dog mom,” conservatives have taken up saying that, sometimes, we love our dogs in the wrong way.
A recent Pew Research study found that of the 62 percent of Americans surveyed that do own a pet, a majority (51 percent) consider their pets equal to human members of their family. Another recent study conducted by Rover, an application-based dog walking and dog sitting network service, found that 22 percent of millennials and 23 percent of Gen Z pet owners have substituted pets for children for the time being or permanently. The pet food brand, I and Love and You, commissioned a similar study in 2021 and found that 42 percent of pet owners surveyed said they bought their pet as a “starter child.” They treat them accordingly: 29 percent throw their pets birthday parties, 24 percent dress themselves and their pets in matching outfits, and 41 percent have celebrated Mother’s or Father’s Day as pet owners.
“First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Fido in the baby carriage,” TAC Contributing Editor Matthew Schmitz wrote in First Things back in 2017, justifiably mocking this phenomenon.
Even Pope Francis has weighed in on this curiosity on multiple occasions, most recently in early 2022. “We see that people do not want to have children, or just one and no more. And many, many couples do not have children because they do not want to, or they have just one—but they have two dogs, two cats…. Yes, dogs and cats take the place of children,” the pope declared. “And this denial of fatherhood or motherhood diminishes us, it takes away our humanity. And in this way civilization becomes aged and without humanity, because it loses the richness of fatherhood and motherhood. And our homeland suffers, as it does not have children.”
I don’t think Schmitz, Pope Francis, or anyone else writing against the dog mom cult are saying you shouldn’t get a dog. And you absolutely should. For adults and children alike, owning a dog provides a deeper understanding of God’s first commandment of man: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
Justly subdue your dog. Engage in the process that is subduing nature and become its master. Mastering your dog is also an exercise in self-mastery. Training your dog takes patience and repetition. It teaches self-discipline and develops sound judgment in the discipline of others, animal or human. Punish them too harshly, and the dog will shy away from all instruction. Punish them too leniently, or reward bad behavior, and you breed chaos.
I was an underclassman in high school when we got Kona. We had previously owned one other dog, also a Siberian Husky, but I was mostly too young to participate in training her. Training Kona was the first time I engaged in this process with a dog that was truly mine. With the help of a trainer, my Mom and I slowly, over many months, domesticated a dog that had previously known only mealtime and the rules he made for himself in his small domain surrounded by a chain-link fence. We taught him the necessary behaviors: we housebroke him; kennel trained him; taught him to not crash doors that remained open, to sit, to lay down, to stay. And we taught him some unnecessary ones: shake, jump, howl, spin, and dance. All virtue is habituated in man, but also his best friend.
If you have a good dog, it will reveal to you something else. Your mastery over its nature is never complete. Your dog would cease to be a dog if it didn’t occasionally mistake your rug for its bathroom, eat something it shouldn’t, break out of the house, or chew something up.
Siberian Huskies are working dogs. They require long walks or plenty of other kinds of physical activity. They are also more pack oriented than other dog species. Anyone who has seen mushing knows Huskies like to work in teams. Kona was no different. My mom is an avid walker and was his main source of exercise—with or without Kona, she will keep getting her 10,000 steps a day. And though it started out awkwardly given his previously solitary lifestyle, Kona loved going to this local doggy daycare that allowed him to socialize with other dogs.
If we failed to give Kona the exercise and socialization he required, he wasn’t shy about letting us know. One time, after failing to walk Kona for two days or so, Kona snuck into my room and partially chewed up my favorite Angels’ ball cap and a few tchotchkes within his reach. (I still wear that hat, by the way—he chewed the left part of the brim as if he was purposefully making it appear worn). He’d express his occasional displeasure in other ways, too. One of his favorite ways to say, “take me for a walk,” was walking into the room where either my mom or I was, looking us dead in the eye, and just peeing on the floor—tile, carpet, rug, it didn’t matter to him.
We can subdue nature, but never fully overcome it. That is true whether we’re talking about flora and fauna, the climate and natural disasters, or our own human nature. Our mastery over nature will always be incomplete. Complete mastery of nature is reserved for its creator and abiding source: God.
Properly loving our pets makes us more fully human. The development of animal cruelty laws in the West, primarily in the British common law through the late 18th and early 19th centuries, often suggested crimes against animals were crimes against humanity, not because animals are human, but because it diminished one’s own humanity.
Owning a dog doesn’t teach us about being more fully human because, as the dog moms might say, they are like us, are “starter children,” or are equal to human members of our family. Instead, they teach us the distinction between man and beast. That man justly has authority over beasts, but when man claims authority over other men, a heightened, more attuned sense of justice is required than repetition and force—justice based on reason, and a shared sense of reason for that matter.
Our pets also teach us about death, though theirs are different from ours. We can’t keep what we master forever, our beasts or ourselves—no act of will can change nature’s final act. It is a fallen reality, but reality nonetheless, one with grieving and then accepting.
Get a dog (maybe two). Get a dog before your kids start begging for one. Treat it well, love it properly, and, yes, let it become part of your family life. Become its master and let mastering it help you master yourself. Grieve when your dog dies, but know that when your death comes, it can be the door to life eternal.
The post Still Man’s Best Friend appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Some of our legislators are dying, but it appears the art of legislating died long ago.
“Just say aye.”
Free advice from Patty Murray of Washington to her Senate colleague, the senior senator from California, Dianne Feinstein.
A clip of this exchange quickly made the rounds on social media, along with more commentary on the geriatric nature of our regime. The day before the “aye” affair, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell froze during a press conference and had to be escorted away by fellow senators.
As my friend Logan Hall tweeted, “our nation declines/decays in tandem with our leaders.”
“Sadly, his face is the face of our entire Gerioligarchy,” tweeted new Blaze Editor-in-Chief Matthew Peterson (congratulations, by the way, Matt).
Sadly, his face is the face of our entire Gerioligarchy. pic.twitter.com/8JurxOP5BW
— Matthew J. Peterson (@docMJP) July 27, 2023
The criticism is well deserved. Between the 90-year-old Feinstein who puts the senior in senior Senator, our octogenarian Senate Minority leader, and a doddering president stumbling through an equally doddering presidency, there’s always fresh material for those commentators who analogize our over-the-hill elites to our over the hill empire. But even that narrative can get old on occasion.
The “aye” affair, some say, is evidence of “gerontocracy” because it was the wrong place and wrong time for Feinstein to get on the stump. But watch the full clip of Feinstein closely:
NOW – 90 years old Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) told to "just say aye" at vote on the defense appropriations bill.pic.twitter.com/d7V5RDclWY
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) July 27, 2023
Feinstein seems surprisingly lucid while delivering her remarks on defense spending. She even seems to roll her eyes when she’s repeatedly told to “just say aye,” and laughs.
Surely, Feinstein’s continued presence in the Senate is alone enough proof of our “gerontocracy.” But Feinstein’s comments illustrate more than just our increasingly elderly elite. The truth is that this is how most elected representatives, not just senile senators, go about the work of legislating—following the lead of staff members, agencies, and experts while hardly bothering to inform themselves.
Staffers and colleagues tell them “vote yes” or “vote no”—and they listen. Most, except for a few standouts, haven’t even read the bill they’re voting on, if they know which one they’re voting on at all.
It’s not just a problem in the United States, either. It’s endemic throughout the western world. In the European Parliament, the most useless parliamentary body ever assembled (members can’t even propose legislation), MPs vote on so many rules and regulations that typically parties have a representative sitting in the front of the chamber signaling how party members should vote during voting sessions.
As the European Parliament functions as the body of yes men for the European Commission, American lawmakers have been reduced, oftentimes on their own accord, to yes men for the bureaucracy and the administrative state.
Some of our legislators are dying, but it appears the art of legislating died long ago.
The post Just Say Aye appeared first on The American Conservative.
State of the Union: Christ has tasked us, in the words of St. Faustina, to “proclaim that mercy is the greatest attribute of God.”
Faith turns predictable into providential. It was raining all day here in Krakow. Our group toured the Sanctuary of St. John Paul II, and then we made our way to the Divine Mercy Sanctuary.
The Divine Mercy Sanctuary, rather an architectural atrocity, is adjacent to a cloistered convent of the Congregation of the Sisters of Our Lady of Mercy. In one of the convent’s chapel, St. Faustina now rests. Above her hangs the Miraculous Image of Merciful Jesus by Adolf Hyła. We spent some time praying there as rain pattered on panes of stained glass, and then celebrated Mass in one of the chapels in the basement of the large sanctuary. When we emerged, the sun had broken through.
My colleague, John Hirschauer, recently wrote a State of the Union blog post about the comments of then-Bishop Americo Aguiar, whom Pope Francis recently named a cardinal.
“We don’t want to convert the young people to Christ or to the Catholic Church or anything like that at all,” Aguiar said. “That we all understand that differences are a richness and the world will be objectively better if we are capable of placing in the hearts of all young people this certainty.”
Aguiar later attempted to walk back these statements. Nevertheless, Hirschauer, while being charitable to Aguiar, delivers sharp and succinct analysis. “Catholics, particularly Catholics in positions of authority, should act as though they believe Catholicism is true—not just that it can be used to create a more just society, or make life meaningful, or tell a compelling story about God’s relationship to human beings—but actually, really true,” Hirschauer writes.
And, “if Christianity is true,” Hirschauer says elsewhere, “we must—not should, but must—’want to convert the young people to Christ.’ If that’s impolite, so be it. Christ came to bring the sword, not to set up an NGO.”
Today’s gospel reading, Matthew 10:34 to 11:1, contains the passage Hirschauer references above:
Jesus said to his Apostles:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth.
I have come to bring not peace but the sword.
For I have come to set
a man against his father,
a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s enemies will be those of his household.“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,
and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;
and whoever does not take up his cross
and follow after me is not worthy of me.
Whoever finds his life will lose it,
and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.“Whoever receives you receives me,
and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.
Whoever receives a prophet because he is a prophet
will receive a prophet’s reward,
and whoever receives a righteous man
because he is righteous
will receive a righteous man’s reward.
And whoever gives only a cup of cold water
to one of these little ones to drink
because he is a disciple–
amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose his reward.”When Jesus finished giving these commands to his Twelve disciples,
he went away from that place to teach and to preach in their towns.
Children against parents. Brothers against brothers. Such is the price of the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us—many received him, others received him not.
As Hirschauer writes, “Take Christianity and Islam. Christianity and Islam make mutually exclusive claims about the most fundamental matters of theology and philosophy: the nature of God, the person of Christ, the path to salvation, and more.… It is not possible that both Christianity and Islam are true.”
I’ve spent the last two weeks intensely studying Catholic Social Teaching here in Krakow, as developed predominantly through Pope Leo XIII and Pope John Paul II. The body of literature most commonly understood as Catholic Social Teaching, we’ve learned, emerges out of a transitional period in Church history.
In the centuries separating Leo XIII’s papacy and the Protestant Reformation, the Church had a reasonably defensive posture. In the throes of Protestant reformers and political repression, the Church adopted a kind of ecclesio-centrism that sought to be a bastion of tradition, and more or less succeeded in that effort. But when what historians call the long 20th century came around, it was time for the Church to open the gates and reclaim evangelization.
I’m unqualified to say whether or not this mission has been a success on the whole, but I certainly owe my Catholic faith to the Church’s continued effort.
What I will say, however, is that missionaries aren’t sent out empty-handed. They carry with them powerful tools for evangelization. One of the most powerful tools at their disposal is the Church’s tradition, ironically thanks to periods of fortification that successfully preserved it. Exposure to this tradition—spiritual, intellectual, and physical—is in no small part why I’m Catholic today.
What Aguiar originally proposed is a view of the Church that is neither a bastion nor evangelical. It takes one of the worst aspects of certain forms of the new evangelization—making concessions to the modern world—and pairs it with one of the worst consequences of withdrawal—passivity. It strips missionaries of their mission, to “make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you.”
Christ brought the sword, but He also brought His Divine Mercy. And He’s tasked us, in the words of St. Faustina, to “proclaim that mercy is the greatest attribute of God.”
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Jones’s malaise now animates our society at large: We, too, are exhausted by the present.
If reviews of 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull made reference to an “aging” Harrison Ford, in 2023 there is no denying that the actor is now old. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny does not shy away from this fact. The film opens by showing Indiana Jones in 1969: We find him clad only in his underwear, awakened in his easy chair by the longhairs partying in the adjacent apartment, blasting the Beatles first thing in the morning.
Still a bit drunk from what appears to be a nightly routine of solitary boozing, Indy grabs a baseball bat and heads to confront the revelers, who laugh and tell the old man to get lost. Humiliated, he returns to his tenement, where he confronts the reality that his family is falling apart. Outside his apartment building, New Yorkers are enjoying a ticker-tape parade celebrating the moon landing. But Dr. Jones is exhausted by the present.
As Americans celebrate the Fourth of July in 2023, we are confronted by a nation seemingly drained of its past vitality. Jones’s malaise now animates our society at large: We, too, are exhausted by the present.
In both cases—the real America of 2023 and Jones’s life in 1969—our exhaustion stems primarily from the present’s stark contrast with the past. There is some sense that our halcyon days are over, and that they cannot be recaptured. Today, the country grapples with the important questions posed by this fatalism. What is the value of the past? Who, if anyone, has the rightful claim to it? Should it have any role in the life of the present – or does the past have a right to stay in the past?
These are the issues addressed by Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. While it isn’t a great film, it does offer some compelling answers—answers that can help those of us who sense that the great America that we used to know is taking on the status of an ancient relic.
In many ways, the Indiana Jones series itself is a historical artifact. The first film was released in 1981 to universal acclaim in a much different America. While everybody loved these movies, not everyone has loved Indy. Critics have derided the character as an avatar of western colonialism, an educated cowboy who travels to exotic places, blasts and whips his way through the local muscle, and locates cultural treasures—only to steal them back to the safety (and sterility) of an American museum. Indeed, the screenwriters apparently feel a bit ashamed of Indiana Jones: All five films include characters who level charges that he is a “thief” and a “graverobber.”
But contrary to what woke critics and Indy’s fictional detractors say, he is not a thief or a graverobber. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jones doesn’t try to procure the Ark of the Covenant as much as he tries to prevent the Nazis from doing so, and he protests when he learns that US authorities will simply keep it in secret storage. In Temple of Doom, when he finds that a small Indian village’s sacred Sankara Stone has been stolen by a Thuggee blood cult, he retrieves it and returns it to the people. In Last Crusade, Indy doesn’t want to seek the Holy Grail—he is compelled to do it in order to rescue his father, a grail expert who has been kidnapped by the Nazis. The goal is not to possess the grail, but to keep it out of Nazi hands. When they find it, there is a brief moment where the younger Jones does want to take the cup, but when his father tells him to leave it behind, he complies. Similarly, the entire plot of Crystal Skull is driven by Indiana’s effort to return the artifact to its indigenous place of origin .
In short, the films don’t depict a rapacious crusader, but rather a man with a deep and abiding respect for the past. Time after time, his impulse is to protect artifacts, to honor them, and when possible, to leave them be. When the situation does not allow them to be left alone, his refrain is that they “belong in a museum.” Woke zealots today see museums as mere storage houses for the spoils of colonialism and war, but that’s not what they are for Indiana Jones. He wants the remains of the past in a museum precisely so they will be protected.
But protection isn’t enough. After all, the Ark of the Covenant would be quite secure sitting in a locked crate at a secret government facility. The museum is a place where the relics will get the reverence that they deserve. Reverence from whom? Professors? Curators? No. Reverence from everyone. Reverence from the people. This indicates Dr. Jones’ recognition that if anyone “owns” the past, it is a collective ownership, a human ownership that reflects our shared history. To know our own time is impossible if we don’t understand both how the present differs from the past and how it represents a continuity with history.
Early in the Dial of Destiny, Jones’s partner insists that “some things should stay buried.” This a pithy digestion of the entire theme of the film, which culminates in a moment where Indiana must decide whether he will live in the glorious past or in the present. While the present is less than ideal, making a choice to abandon the past in its favor amounts to a gesture of hope. The future is uncertain, after all. Choosing to live in the present reflects a will to believe that the future will be worth living. Viewers of the film will find that Jones needs a little intervention in order to let the past go—but he does.
Ultimately though, (re)resurrecting a beloved film franchise—a piece of our shared (pop) cultural inheritance—simply to have an octogenarian encourage us to honor the past by leaving it behind…well, it’s a strange bit of metafiction. After all, if Ford and the makers of the movie really believed its message, they would have never set out to make it. Indeed, for decades Ford himself scoffed at the idea of revisiting classic characters like Han Solo and Indiana Jones. But he has returned to both.
This unwillingness to let cinematic history stay in the past is also underscored by Dial of Destiny’s impressive use of computer technologies that “de-age” Ford in certain scenes, depicting him as a younger man around the age he was in the first three films. Again, this is a very odd choice for a film that finally tells us to let go of the past and live in the now. One wonders: with technology like this, have we really seen the last Indiana Jones movie featuring Harrison Ford (or at least his digitally rendered likeness)? New stories featuring a 35-year-old Indy in his prime could be made in perpetuity. There’s a lot of money to be made. Let’s hope Hollywood can learn the lesson of Dial of Destiny and respect the past by leaving that money on the table.
Which brings us back to our present. This week we celebrate the foundation of this nation and our shared history. The great symbols of our heritage have not been treated well as of late. The founding is falsely smeared as an effort to protect slavery. Whether it’s via demands to expand the Supreme Court or calls for abolishing the electoral college, the government bequeathed to us by the Constitution is under attack. Many Americans now see these documents as relics: ones that deserve no reverence, even ones that might need to be destroyed. In making these attacks, the belligerents of our society assert some ownership of that past—they claim the right to do with it what they will, even if that means their destruction.
The Fourth of July is a holiday where we remember our past, and how our present is an extension of it. By remembering it, we revere it. And while the America that we see in 2023 may never again be what it once was—before the cultural revolution and its assassinations, before 9/11, before the terrible year of 2020—it still belongs to us. That means that while the past perhaps cannot be recaptured, we nevertheless have an obligation to honor what remains, to protect it, and to transmit that legacy to a new generation. That Independence Day remains an occasion to celebrate this nation is one of many ways we continue to fulfill that duty. In doing so, we rededicate ourselves to its legacy, and choose to look toward a shared future in a spirit of American optimism rather than one of trepidation.
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